This study is the eighth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report examines the initial reading strategies that a group of participating students used to begin a reading-to-write task and the impact of those…

This study is the ninth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report focuses on ways in which broadly-based cultural and institutional factors silently influence students' reading and writing behaviors.…

One teacher's experience with changes in writing skills and attitudes while teaching writing led to studies of the experiences of three female graduate student writing tutors with widely varying backgrounds working in a university tutorial service. One was a student from a blue collar family who had entered college as a mature student; one had…

Intended to show teachers how their approaches to the teaching of writing reflect a particular area of research and to show researchers how the intuitions of teachers reflect research findings, the articles in this book are classified according to three approaches to writing: processing, distancing, and modeling. After an introductory essay that…

E. D. Hirsch's call for authoritative knowledge about composition is flawed, according to this document, because he focuses on the product and not the process of composing, thereby excluding more of the problem of composition than he includes. Hirsch's principle of readability--that styles that communicate meaning with less effort from the reader…

A study examined the analytic writing development of high school seniors and college students. Subjects, approximately 50 high school seniors and 100 college students, performed two writing tasks on the same topic, one for an audience in agreement and one for a hostile audience. About a third of the subjects made taped protocols of their writing…

This document is designed to help integrate the skills of composing (writing) with the procedures and perspectives of New York elementary, secondary, and continuing science education programs. Sections are devoted to the composing process and its relationship to a science laboratory model, to techniques for evaluating writing, and to the spectrum…

Defining the "product" approach to composition as that which emphasizes the finished product over the steps that led up to completion, and the "process" approach as that which emphasizes the recursive steps that lead to the final product, this paper compares these two approaches to composition instruction. The first section…

The organizational report and letter writing course at Ohio University (Athens) is an advanced composition course designed to help students who expect to do such writing in their future jobs, but for whom technical writing and business communication courses are either inappropriate or insufficient. Students work in groups of four, investigating a…

Intended to give basic students simultaneous practice in reading and writing with an emphasis on accuracy, conciseness, and precision, the "finding the beef" method centers itself on summaries of news events. The first step of the method is to supply students with the appropriate data blocks based on news events, preferably those…

Research about writing and the teaching of writing has demonstrated that writing is a process, that thinking and writing are inextricably connected, that workshop and tutorial methods are more efficient than teacher or textbook dominated instruction in writing, and that correctness does not have to be a major concern in the teaching of writing.…

This field manual for composition teachers, written by community college and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) writing instructors, examines practical and theoretical problems and strategies associated with teaching composition. Essays in chapter I, by Ruth Mitchell and Faye Peitzman, underscore the relevance and implications of…

"Language Skills in English," a three-year project designed to explore the application of mastery learning techniques to solve the reading and writing problems of secondary school students in Scotland, is discussed in this paper. Background information provided in the first section of the paper concerns the context of the project, its…

Following a literature review on the subjects of the decline in student writing abilities and increased student writing apprehension, this paper offers teachers information on a basic writing program that reduces writing anxiety and improves writing skills through large doses of positive reinforcement. The second section of the paper discusses the…

This manual is intended to assist elementary school teachers in developing classroom writing experiences. The sections in the first part of the manual address the individual stages of the writing process (prewriting, writing, and postwriting/editing) by reviewing research, presenting case studies of children's writing, and outlining activities,…