Thirty-five outstanding application essays selected by admissions officers from top law schools around the nation are presented along with advice on writing the essay and on the admission process. It is intended to inspire people applying to law school and relieve their anxiety over the essays, acting as a catalyst for the applicant's creativity.…

In order to evaluate an experimental writing program involving word processors as tools, a study examined the use of cloze techniques as a method for indicating reading progress as it relates to writing. Subjects, 87 Canadian primary school children, were involved in a three-year longitudinal study of the effects of this experimental writing…

Focusing on language development--from beginning speech to literacy--with particular attention paid to growth in writing, this paper identifies and describes: (1) links between speech and writing; and (2) features of children's written and spoken texts that indicate growth. The process of constructing "texts" is presented as the fabric…

This paper describes techniques used by a German instructor with American students during a summer abroad program. Learning activities, both in and outside of class, concentrate on writing. The students keep logs and diaries, which force them to be aware of their surroundings and to participate more actively in the life around them. With the…

A study was conducted at College of the Sequoias (COS) to examine the entry-level reading and writing skills of students and their grade outcomes in the social science courses for which they were enrolled. The study sought to identify any predictors of students' eventual success/non-success in class. The study focused on the placement test scores…

Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

The first of a planned series of papers, this document describes in detail a context for writing created by a teacher and her second grade class. Section one includes the teacher's diary of plans for using an imaginary doll, "Mr. Togs the Tailor" as a context for learning during most of a term and selected children's writing on such topics as Mr.…

Most of the 24 books reviewed in this annotated bibliography concern writing and are recent publications (1980-1985). Titles and authors are as follows: "Teacher" (Sylvia Ashton-Warner); "What Did I Write? Beginning Writing Behavior" (Marie M. Clay); "Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process" (William E. Coles);…

A workshop was developed at the Bank of Canada to give instruction in writing brief summaries of financial analyses to junior economists entering the bank after university. These employees were expected to write these analyses for the senior officers of the institution. It had been found that the specialists had not learned strategies for…

For basic writers, learning to write means learning new syntactic and textual forms and new ways of relating to an audience. This means that students must have certain kinds of knowledge about what differentiates writing from speech and what distinguishes sentences and texts/paragraphs that are focused and explicit. In addition, an enabling…

After students recommended books by M. E. Kerr, such as "Is That You, Miss Blue?" and "Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack," a college teacher realized that Kerr's books contained memorable characters and were suitable for classroom use. Particularly useful was Kerr's 1983 nonfiction book, "Me, Me, Me, Me, Me," which recounts…

Facing the problem of a wide discrepancy in grading standards for student essays, the English department at a Texas community college developed a standardized method of grading students' expository and persuasive essays. The department established a committee of 10 full-time instructors whose objective was to standardize grading for all required…

The relationships among time perspective, mood, age, and an academic grade point average (GPA) and goal-writing abilities were investigated in 123 senior baccalaureate nursing students from three university programs. Time perspective--past, present, and future--was measured by an Experiential Inventory, Circles/Line Test, and two Opinion Surveys.…

Four issues of a University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) newsletter by and for teaching assistants (TAs) are presented, with focus on writing, grading, undergraduate instruction, and plagiarism. Topics include: making writing assignments that are clear and provide clear grading criteria; writing with computers, writing by scientists and…

A study was conducted at Snow College to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of college remedial courses with that of regular courses of study. The study compared the performance of 48 students in four sections of a remedial English class with that of 24 students with similar skill levels enrolled in a freshman composition course. The…