Designed to evaluate the degree to which an essay is successful in giving information, this instrument is an analytic/holistic scoring guide for evaluating any writing that contains generalizations supported by elaboration. The following criteria are applied: (1) relevance--any statement that gives information or elaborates on information already…

To study the stability of students' writing performances across occasions, four essays were obtained from each of 107 college students. These were scored with an analytic system that counts errors in 18 categories. Score reliability, computed by summing the 18 categories, was .36 for a single essay and .68 for the set of four essays. Score…

To ascertain if the descriptive criteria of the original Evaluation Scale of the City University of New York (CUNY) Writing Skills Assessment Test might be refined in the light of CUNY's 4 years of experience with large scale testing, a two-phase study was conducted over the period of 1 year, from May 1981 through June 1982, and involved nearly…

Composition teachers need to pluralize their notions of what constitutes viable discourse to enrich their own rhetoric and to "listen" more effectively to students' writing, so that their notions of written discourse may come to reflect the rainbow of international influences that exist in the United States. A good first step would be to…

The grading standard of the Language Skills Center at the State University of New York (Geneseo) has been adapted from the Diederich-French-Carlton Composition Scale and is designed so that instructors may respond objectively to student writing in six important areas: ideas; organization; vocabulary; sentence structure; punctuation; and…

Detailing the false starts, uncertainty, and internal questioning that occur as companies organize and manage language simplification projects, the 12 case studies contained in the two sections of this book reveal how some business organizations have benefited by simplifying consumer documents. Descriptions of each case contain information on the…

Rather than being trained and supervised, graduate teaching assistants in rhetoric and speech should be taught and advised. Teaching assistants, or graduate instructors, should be considered colleagues, not merely cheap labor to teach courses the rest of the faculty does not want to teach. The first step in establishing an effective teaching and…

Beginning with the fall semester, 1983, California required all community colleges to test their students on minimal writing competency before being granted an Associate in Arts or Associate in Science degree. This guide explains the ways in which students at Bakersfield College may complete this requirement (i.e., by initial placement into…

A study examined the writing experiences of three college students during their freshman and sophomore years to determine how students in a classroom setting determine the writing requirements of that discipline and for that teacher, and how they go about producing their writing assignments. The study used ethnographic observation and interviews,…

A study was undertaken to determine the impact of the new writing component pioneered by New York State on General Educational Development (GED) performance or passing rates. Data were collected in two phases: Phase I dealt with passing rate data prior to the introduction of the writing sample to the writing subtest; Phase II was begun during the…

A difficulty associated with the use of Golub and Frederick's syntactic density score was the time required in hand tabulation. This drawback was resolved with the development by Kidder of a computer program which calculates a syntactic density score for writing samples. The purpose of this study was to examine the sensitivity of the Syntactic…

In 1981, a survey was conducted to determine the methods used in Arizona community colleges to place students in English composition courses. Questionnaires concerning placement practices were sent to 32 community college administrators, and 21 usable responses were returned. Study findings included the following: (1) while no college required an…

The purpose of the essay portion of the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test is to identify students whose English language skills are not sufficiently strong to ensure that they can successfully manage the writing required in regular freshman classes. Students are given 20 minutes to read and respond to the essay topic. The essays…

Five studies of holistic writing assessment procedures examined interactive relationships of the participants, processes, and products of writing assessment episodes. The first study examined practices in designing writing test prompts. The second study investigated the effects of variation in the specification of audience in a writing test prompt…

Students can improve their writing skills by studying grammar. In learning to apply a logical system in their analysis of sentence parts, for example, students develop mental discipline. This discipline can be strengthened through the grammatical analysis of their own papers. In these evaluations, which include error and stylistic analyses and a…