The organizational report and letter writing course at Ohio University (Athens) is an advanced composition course designed to help students who expect to do such writing in their future jobs, but for whom technical writing and business communication courses are either inappropriate or insufficient. Students work in groups of four, investigating a…

Intended to give basic students simultaneous practice in reading and writing with an emphasis on accuracy, conciseness, and precision, the "finding the beef" method centers itself on summaries of news events. The first step of the method is to supply students with the appropriate data blocks based on news events, preferably those…

Research about writing and the teaching of writing has demonstrated that writing is a process, that thinking and writing are inextricably connected, that workshop and tutorial methods are more efficient than teacher or textbook dominated instruction in writing, and that correctness does not have to be a major concern in the teaching of writing.…

This field manual for composition teachers, written by community college and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) writing instructors, examines practical and theoretical problems and strategies associated with teaching composition. Essays in chapter I, by Ruth Mitchell and Faye Peitzman, underscore the relevance and implications of…

"Language Skills in English," a three-year project designed to explore the application of mastery learning techniques to solve the reading and writing problems of secondary school students in Scotland, is discussed in this paper. Background information provided in the first section of the paper concerns the context of the project, its…

Following a literature review on the subjects of the decline in student writing abilities and increased student writing apprehension, this paper offers teachers information on a basic writing program that reduces writing anxiety and improves writing skills through large doses of positive reinforcement. The second section of the paper discusses the…

This manual is intended to assist elementary school teachers in developing classroom writing experiences. The sections in the first part of the manual address the individual stages of the writing process (prewriting, writing, and postwriting/editing) by reviewing research, presenting case studies of children's writing, and outlining activities,…

Noting that American elementary schools over the years have emphasized reading to the detriment of writing, a study examined the efficacy of a writing program that places the student and the teacher in direct contact with the writing process by (1) requiring daily student writing and suggesting the teacher frequently write with the students, (2)…

Intended as an overview for English department faculty with no direct experience in teaching freshman composition, this report contains a general account of the origin, basic features, and current direction of using tutorial methods in freshman composition classes. The five sections of the report provide the following information: (1) the history…

Combining concepts of cognitive theory with those of rhetoric and linguistics can help writing teachers understand the kinds of activities that will enable basic writers to produce syntactic constructions appropriate for the content they have generated. A review of research studies of sentence combining, syntactic constructions, grammatical…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. This pamphlet is concerned with what is involved in the learning of new ideas and what part language plays in the process. It includes…

Recent developments in such fields as linguistics, logic, information theory, computer science, speech act theory, and psychology can lead to a greater interdisciplinary understanding of the process of writing (defined as purposeful activity involving language use in special modes). Purposes for writing, which may be correlated with the many…

A six-month observational study of Southeast Asian children (N=4) as they wrote and revised various pieces in English (their second language) revealed that the subjects developed three areas of writing skill: a sense of audience, a sense of voice, and a sense of power in language. (Author/CB)

The English composing processes and products of a group of Spanish researchers at the University of Cordoba, Spain, were studied. The group (1) has a good grasp of the information structure of the English scientific article; (2) rarely undertakes structural revision; and (3) is primarily concerned with precise expression of their thoughts.…

Offers a variety of practical writing ideas that can help first-grade teachers encourage writing across the curriculum. (FL)