Because of dramatic changes in the technology of written communication, college graduates are now producing letters, memos, and reports by dictating for word processing systems. Case studies from structured interviews with 28 people in business, industry, government, and the professions show that the composing process of writers who use the new…

To be effective, composition teachers should keep four things in mind. First, writing is as much a process as a product. To understand this, teachers must themselves write, so that they will experience the satisfaction of discovering ideas and viewpoints. Second, individual students' composing processes should be carefully identified before any…

An inservice course on the teaching of writing was designed to provide a content within which reflection and learning could occur. The course began with a week-long period of study and discussion of theories of language, with particular emphasis on the development of writing abilities, and a consideration of the implications of such theories for…

Composition can play an important role in helping our society move away from being a "mentally handicapped" left-brained culture because composition is one of the few "bispheral" activities; left and right brain functions seem to alternate during the writing process, supplementing the insights of each other. Currently, however, most teaching of…

An informal survey of graduate student teaching assistants who were about to teach their first undergraduate composition course was undertaken by asking them what they planned to do with regard to teaching a number of concepts. Those questions were followed one week later by similar questions rephrased to ask what the novice teachers do themsleves…

Based on the observation that freshman composition students associate writing with pain and unpleasantness and have been given little opportunity to engage in enjoyable writing, this paper advocates a method for making freewriting and the journal central and integral dimensions of the writing class. After discussing the techniques and the benefits…

The guiding principles by which the Albion (New York) school district developed its written composition curriculum guide include two basic assumptions about the learning/teaching of composition skills and eight other assumptions that reflect salient features of the composing process. The fundamental assumptions are that writing can be taught and…

Teachers should note that revision is an integral part of the writing process and that writers use revision in various ways. In some cases, revision means rewriting--beginning at the end to discover the real focus of the paper and how to organize it for the greatest effect. In other cases, revision may mean simply polishing by deleting, adding,…

A four-part heuristic model seeks to enhance teacher and student-writer awareness of the significance of the self as writer. The questions in the heuristic examine the relationships between the self and the self as writer, between the self and the subject matter, between the self and the audience, and between the self and the form of the…

Organizing writing students into three-member editorial groups is a teaching technique that focuses student attention on the stages of the writing process, their progression, and their interrelation. The technique also increases peer cooperation and evaluation, while enabling teachers to spend less time grading homework and more time working with…

One way to help basic writers become more effective writers is to encourage them to consider and write about what they do in writing--the problems they face and the satisfactions they glean. Using a scheme that involves using a hierarchy of stages of abstraction in discourse, students can be led to development of their writing skills. One such…

To mimic as closely as possible successful classroom procedures, NCTE convention speakers should be assigned topics one hour before their sessions, with only the rhetorical form specified. The audience should shout evaluative comments during presentation and the recorder should interrupt at each spelling and punctuation error. A final grade should…

Prewriting exercises such as outlines, successive drafts, or free writing are not helpful to students from oral cultures who are unfamiliar with the writing process. Speaking as a rehearsal technique for writing can help nontraditional students formulate and organize ideas before starting the first draft. Speaking as a rehearsal for writing…

Frequently, writing students are so concerned with correct grammar and mechanics that their essays are stilted and dry. Their writing is further hampered by rhetorical formulas that describe what the structure of the essay should be when it is finished but not how to go about writing it. Can poetic invention strategies help produce better essays?…

Five pressures make writing difficult for freshman composition students: the pressure of perfectionism, the pressure of interesting an audience, the pressure of length, the pressure of finding an appropriate topic, and the pressure of time. Teachers can help students deal with these pressures through individual conferences with each student and by…