Presents the journalistic essay as both appealing to college composition students and helpful in teaching them writing clarity, accuracy, organization, and the integration of narration, description, and exposition. (DD)

Describes in detail a magazine article writing course, including textbooks, teaching units, goals and objectives, teaching resources, and specific assignments. Tells how the course emphasizes preparation of a marketable skill. (AEA)

Offers an essay on the "obscenities" of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," to be used as a class exercise in critical reading, diction, and tone. (RL)

Argues that generative rhetoric can lead technical writing students to produce more effective and better developed business reports. (TJ)

Offers a definition of explanatory text, and summarizes research on why abstract concepts and principles are difficult for lay readers to understand. Describes a three-week unit for composition classes on spotting difficult ideas, diagnosing the type of difficulty they pose, and selecting the text features most likely to make them less difficult.…

Secondary teachers returning from Cummins Engine Foundation Writing Project seminars (Indiana) shared their ideas about integrating writing skills with various academic subjects. This article provides helpful hints to teachers of business, electronics, English, foreign languages, home economics, mathematics, science, social studies, and vocational…

Author explains that good communication skills require the following: an understanding of the audience and subtle interactions between writer and reader, organization skills, and certain basic communication skills. The task of writing a grant proposal in response to a specific set of instructions is used to illustrate the analysis and responses…

Annotates 17 conference papers, theses, and journal articles (published between 1989 and 1992) from the ERIC database that discuss the advantages and disadvantages of journal writing at all levels of education. (RS)

Development of the Learning Strategies Survey is described, and two related studies involving 1,091 college students (354 males and 737 females) are presented to demonstrate use of this survey to predict learning from expository text. Factor analysis yielded two stable factors of high internal reliability and acceptable test-retest reliability.…

Emphasizing expository writing, this paper describes the writing instruction approaches used in IKIP Bandung, an Indonesian institute. The syntax-to-rhetoric approach is discussed along with strategies to help students practice topic development with appropriate linguistic forms. (Contains three references.) (LB)

To study the effects of introductions and conclusions on the evaluation of student essays, 154 undergraduates graded 10 essays in which the quality of introduction or conclusion was varied. Quality of the introduction had a greater effect on the grade than did quality of the conclusion. (SLD)

This article focuses on strategies in expository essay instruction. Detailed descriptions of instructional procedures in teaching students the recursive processes of planning, drafting, and revising expository essays are provided. Ways to foster students' self-regulation and motivation in writing are provided and potential problems in strategy…

Proposes assigning polemics, suasive essays, and paradoxical encomia as a means to help students write in classical civic discourse forms, which enfranchise the personal in the service of the community. Presents guidelines for each assignment. (NH)