In order to facilitate the decentralization of the Illinois writing assessment program, this handbook describes and provides materials for writing assessment training workshops. The first of the nine sections in the handbook gives a general overview of the Illinois Writing Assessment. The second section, on training for assessment, describes…

The performance-related writing and reading competencies required in most occupations are seldom emphasized in elementary and secondary school education. Performance-related writing may be simplistic, but its composition is more complex--in occupational writing, context, audience assessment, attention to detail, concise clarity, message…

In response to a need for writers in corporations who are able to construct well-written speeches, a format for a speech-writing seminar for corporate writers has been developed. First, there are two kinds of seminars: open, for which anyone could register; and in-house, which is conducted for a specific company or organization. Second, in…

A course in advanced English as a second language that focused on the writing of formal research papers revealed that even students who had chosen personally interesting topics and were able to organize facts and present them well still had difficulty. They had problems beginning and ending their papers, they approached their topics warily, and…

Designed to help teachers find an effective approach in teaching expository writing, this guide divides expository writing into five main types: definition/classification, comparison/contrast, thesis/proof, problem/solution, and inference (drawing conclusions). Five different starter techniques are presented with each of the five main types of…

When the English-placement examination essays of college freshmen who had passed the examination were compared with essays of students who had failed, it was found that the most-important differences between the two groups of essays occurred in the area of content development and organization rather than in spelling, grammar, or punctuation. A…

Written syntactic complexity is considered in relation to the four modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description). In a study of 153 children at three ability ranges within each of three grade levels (three, four, and five), syntactic complexity was found to differ significantly across the modes. The range of syntactic…

Basic writing teachers can make use of the Learning Cycle teaching technique to design exploration and invention activities with which their students can practice analytical writing. The Learning Cycle approach is based on Piagetian theory and involves a three-phase process of exploration, invention, and discovery. In the exploration phase…

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

Based on a review of the research and theory on cohesion in writing, it was hypothesized that developmental students could improve their writing competence and their use of cohesive ties by studying the mental process, meaning, mechanics, and rhetorical purposes of cohesive ties. To test this hypothesis, the persuasive and expository compositions…

Intended as a practical guide for persons interested in the field of free lance writing, this book provides information on the following topics: the individual's response to the magazine publishing market; magazines and the types of articles that are marketable; methods for locating story material; ways of questioning and interpreting an editor's…

A writing course structured on the principle that personal experience essays should be written as arguments that draw out a conflict or opposing view can help student writers avoid producing prose that is either too abstract or too concrete. Students can be taught to approach the personal essay as a special type of argument on a particular…

Some of the "supra-grammatical" features of scripts written by undergraduate students in India are examined. The script writing was a test administered to assess the proficiency of students in the advanced cognitive and rhetorical skills involved in composition, both in their native language and English. The particular type of composition chosen…

The operative principle behind the use of essays as models for composition is that if students study and imitate the wide variety of rhetorical forms in an essay collection they will write well-organized and fluent papers. Unfortunately, when students are asked to copy forms the result is a clearly organized paper that says very little and has…

Ten current books covering a variety of topics relating to composition are reviewed in this paper. The first three reviews are of books describing actual writing abilities of students: "Language Development: Kindergarten through Grade 12" by Walter Loban; "The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18)" by James Britton and his…