The junior high English teacher should encourage creative writing to make the students more aware of themselves and the world around them. (JH)

In teaching students to write extended definitions it is essential for writing instructors to teach students the concept of criteria. Without such a concept students will never be able to write effective definitions on their own. The criteria they establish for a particular definition allow them to judge which items support their positions on an…

To contribute intelligently to the scholarly debate in their field, students must realize that variations in vocabulary, stylistic conventions and methods of argumentation among different disciplines' literature reveal distinct assumptions about and methods for working within the world. The broad agreement between author and audience on the…

A Master of Arts in Technical and Expository Writing program has been implemented in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Designed to make future teachers and technical writers into better writers, the program gives them a larger view of the writing process in which they are participating. Three required courses…

In order to study two aspects of the composing process, goal-setting and risk-taking, English and reading graduate students were given a set of readings on the topic of introspection and asked to write weekly papers in response. The papers were summaries, reaction statements, synthesis essays, and position papers, and students kept ongoing…

Composition specialists will find Plato's dialogues, and especially his conception of writing, useful for studying the nature of writing. Plato's strategy, in "Phaedrus" and other dialogues, was to use first person, to conceal himself by using an "I" that he created. In recent times this strategy, using the first person, has…

The reliability, validity, and score discrepancies of 94 expository essays scored in conference versus remote settings were studied. Focus was on comparing holistic ratings obtained in both settings. Essays written by college freshmen on two different topics were scored by readers working in a conference setting and by different readers working in…

A consideration of real world language use yields five questions that could prove helpful in assessing student writing achievements: (1) What is the writer's purpose or intention? (2) What audience does the writer have in mind? (3) What are the organizing principles of the piece? (4) What range of experience and knowledge might one reasonably…

Focusing on a meeting held in January 1983, this pamphlet describes the Forum on the Productivity of Plain English, from which grew the permanent Plain English Forum, which is committed to spreading the message that plain English is good business. The pamphlet includes quotations from leaders in business and industry explaining why they feel that…

This paper discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent and cites a study that examined the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers. T-unit measurements revealed that there is little difference between the groups in the number of clauses per T-unit, but the skilled writers…

This paper describes an episode in the history of journalism that reveals a continuing tension in news reporting. Dating from the invention of the telegraph in the late nineteenth century, news reports have been increasingly patterned after either a "scientific" or a "literary" model. The scientific report is based on irreducible facts, high-speed…

To compare the relative reliable uses and cost effectiveness of the analytic, the holistic, and the primary trait scoring methods, an inquiry was conducted in which a group of raters scored a large number of secondary school students' essays according to each of the scoring methods. Raters were nine graduate students in English who were trained in…

In transforming any college writing program into a cross-disciplinary writing program, similar to the one instituted at Beaver College in Philadelphia, the following steps are suggested: enlist the support of respected English faculty members, request colleagues in other departments to submit sample freshman writing assignments, encourage other…