Noting that effective writing requires organization, honesty, and personal experiences, this booklet offers suggestions for teaching students to write expository essays that are serious and truthful. The first section of the booklet suggests ways to teach students to organize their ideas, while the second section discusses both the value of…

In order to examine the differential availability of attention between the self-written text and standard text conditions, changes in error detection performance of unskilled hearing writers were compared with those of profoundly deaf writers. Subjects, 10 profoundly, pre-lingually deaf college freshmen with no additional handicaps and a…

Developed from a series of workshops in Kenya, this handbook offers practical guidance for those creating printed distance education materials for African students. The introduction describes the workshops and a short section explains how to use the handbook. Twelve units appear on the following topics: (1) overview of distance education; (2)…

An exploratory study investigated how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Using data from verbal protocols, the initial plans of 12 writers (5 experts and 7 student writers) who were working on an expository writing task were examined. The protocols were coded for types of planning. Independent measures of the…

Recent use of the "New Yorker" Education Program in an upper division non-fiction writing class in the School of Journalism of the University of Tennessee proved to be very effective. Initially, the numerous assignments to read detailed articles appeared overwhelming to the students, but they soon learned the importance of reading as the…

"Purpose" is an important term in rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy. An analysis of the presentation of "purpose" in three well-regarded, theory-based textbooks ("Writing in the Liberal Arts Tradition: A Rhetoric with Readings,""Writing with a Purpose," and "Form and Surprise in Composition")…

Noting that recent issues of several scholarly journals have contained criticism of protocol analysis and the use of verbal reports in the analysis of the writing process, this paper examines some of the charges made and then explores the implications of the criticisms. Specific charges addressed in the paper include the following: (1) protocols…

The use of a Jonathan Schwartz essay as a prose model to teach writing lends itself appropriately to classroom discussions on various aspects of autobiography and general narrative design. Such use has proved to be particularly helpful with young writers because of its deceptively simple style and language and its use of a variety of sophisticated…

The relation between reading and writing is important because tacit and possibly unwarranted assumptions underlie the theories and pedagogies which govern these processes. These assumptions are challenged by the claims that: (1) reading and writing are related in neurolinguistically specifiable ways; (2) they do not seem to be simple inverses of…

A theory of style called the doctrine of synonymity argues that the separation of form from content allows the possibility of alternative phrasing. This theory led to the conception that during the writing process, writers consider different ways of phrasing and settle on the formulation that best expresses the meaning intended. However, the…

Extralexical information, that is, those semantic properties evoked by words which are not usually accommodated in lexicons of any kind, is essential for the comprehension of numerous ordinary sentences in a natural language. A brief review of studies on forms of extralexical information shows that those works do not deal with: (1) questions of…

In writing, as with tools, form must always follow function. From this perspective there can be no "good" writing, only effective writing. Unfortunately, in most instructional situations the function of communicating to an audience is often neglected. Most so-called poor writing falls into the category of writer-based prose. Once student writing…

The act of composing is best described as a set of distinguishable processes that interact. There are four methods for researching these processes: (1) behavior protocols, in which subjects are observed but are not asked to report their thought processes verbally; (2) directed reports, in which subjects are asked to explain how they performed a…

A study was conducted to obtain descriptive data on whether a student is aware of an audience when writing, what students perceive as the purpose of a persuasive writing assignment, and what steps comprise their writing process. Approximately 500 tenth grade student essays, prompted by an assignment based on the theme of the literature the class…

A study to determine the effect of audience on student writers' revision strategies involved 13 college students, seven reasonably competent upper-level writers and six basic writers, who were assigned to write for an hour on a uniform essay topic, composing aloud into a tape recorder as they did so. Six of the upper level students and five of the…