A study investigated the readability of Norwegian law texts intended for both the legal profession and the public (e.g., laws regulating social insurance and public administration) that contained public information about tax payment. Six passages from the samples were rewritten by changing a number of specific morphological, lexical, and syntactic…

The commonalities between the teaching of writing and the teaching of English as a Second Language (ESL) are discussed. With common instructional practices of iterativeness, contextualization, and cognition delineated between the two fields, four levels of literacy for ESL students are specified. Four levels of ability are distinguished,…

This paper discusses a study on the composing processes by which native Japanese, Japanese Americans, and native Americans write technical or business English. Results of the study revealed a specific preference by students for one of the three general phases of composing: pre-writing, writing, or rewriting. Although the process preference did not…

A freshman writing assignment sequence encouraged students to use metaphors to think their way through scientific topics, improving their writing skills in the process. The students were all women, aged 18 to 48 years, who had been journal writing for several months but who did not consider themselves competent readers or writers. Reading material…

Addressing the difficulty encountered by many vocational students in narrowing, focusing, developing, and structuring their ideas for technical writing projects, a computer program was designed to provide these students with a simple, time-saving method of brainstorming and organizing their thoughts. By asking thought-generating questions…

With funding made available by the World Bank, additional (Phase II) activities were undertaken in Bangladesh to enhance business management education and training. Executive Development Programmes (EDPs) were planned and carried out according to the model previously developed and validated. Eight seminars were offered for the Institute of…

A study of the verbs used in the management sections of nursing texts looked at the use of verbs as lexical items and grammatical forms and at their form-function relationship. The analysis of verbs as lexical items attempted to establish whether or not there was a common core vocabulary among the four texts studied. The examination of verbs as…

The focus of the articles in this journal issue is helping students write for real audiences. The document contains the following articles: "Real Audiences: The Only Kind We Write For" (Margaret Queenan); "A Literary Magazine for Middle Grades" (Anthony R. Angelo and Marie-Jeanne Laurent); "Rewarding Understanding and…

Conference papers and descriptions of panels, workshops, and poster sessions are separated by topic into five "stems." The first stem, Advanced Technology Applications, contains papers covering advanced technology training, evaluation and applications of word processing equipment, publication databases, electronic and online…

Prepared by representatives of industry and the educational community, the papers in this collection address issues of interest in the field of technical communication. Specific topics discussed are as follows: (1) the Resource Materials Project of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), (2) the relationship…

This manual is intended to train distance education staff in how to develop and edit teaching materials. Addressed in the individual units of the guide are the following topics: appointing writers, preparing to write, developing a course outline, selecting the structure of a unit, presenting the subject matter, developing student activities,…

A city planner's writing is usually not "technical" in the sense that the writing of engineers is technical. In each planning genre, extremely complex information, some of it "technical"--numbers, projections, and so forth--must be communicated clearly. For the professional planner, there are often severe time constraints and the need to proceed…

Technical writing teachers who believe in the fundamental value of group work and its potential for helping students preevaluate their papers must deal with the problems associated with the technique by adding structure to student efforts in the areas of group training, group activities, and group evaluation. Explicitly training students to…

Noting that medical consent forms traditionally have been so full of medical and legal jargon that they have been impossible for even the educated layperson to understand, this paper presents a model for revising medical consent forms to make them more comprehensible. After describing the model, the paper explains each step involved in using it,…

Seven people who both write and read various kinds of reports in their professions were asked to read and respond to identical sets of student reports over a four-month period in order to determine whether they responded to personae. Attached to each unevaluated and unidentified student report was a form with 15 different response areas that…