Emphasis on writer's role, audience, and thesis can help students improve their writing.

Describes how the four traditional kinds of writing (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) are used in advertising and suggests ways that advertising and the four modes may be used to teach composition. (DD)

Some principles that are imporant in both legal drafting and expository writing are discussed, including the value of beginning to write before completing all necessary research, and of developing a hierarchical structure, or outline. These steps encourage feedback as to what further information is needed and allow uninterrupted thinking. (JMD)

Uses a linguistic analysis of a sample freshman theme to argue that the motivating context must elicit a genuine speech act, that the students must conceive of their themes as semantic units or unified wholes, and that novice writers must learn to become readers of their own writing. (AA)

Describes an approach to paper assignments in a literature course designed to present sufficient options in essay topics to allow the individual student to develop new skills while working at his/her own level of advancement. (HOD)

Provides information on how to organize and teach report writing skills in the intermediate grades. Divides the task into 8 steps, beginning with identifying a topic for research and ending with editing the final draft. Includes a list of evaluative questions which students may use to assess their work. (JDH)

Two essays explore scholarly opinions on the use of the generic pronoun "he" and discuss guidelines for avoiding its use in expository writing. (HTH)

This is a student guide to writing an effective doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis. This book disaggregates the elements of the dissertation and provides the student with a description, definition, and example of each dissertation element. The author presents multiple viewpoints that include both quantitative and qualitative approaches.…

Rejects the premise that all parts must be related to the whole and to each other in a written composition. (Author/RB)

Teachers should instruct students to seek truth in spite of opposition. Henry D. Thoreau is cited as the model for this life-long artistic endeavor. (RB)

Author suggests that pupils will write more coherent and unified compositions if they are taught to look for the logical connection between parts, looking to see if two parts are joined by an and" relationship, an and then" relationship, a but" relationship, a more specifically" relationship or a therefore" relationship. (PD)

Ascertaining that the college freshman and professional writing he analyzed did not differ significantly in the rank order or frequency with which transitional devices were used in description, author advises that it may be a waste of time to teach high school and college students these devices as if they were not already a basic component of…

Programs using innovative methods to teach expository writing are described. Common approaches that these programs utilized to demystify writing--e.g., partitioning the writing task into stages, using peers to provide feedback--are examined. The article concludes with a discussion of other trends in the teaching of writing. (RM)