An informal survey was conducted of high school and college English teachers to examine whether they taught writing the way they actually wrote or by some other method. In response to a question about the piece of writing each teacher regarded as his or her best, all considered the best pieces to be undergraduate or graduate school assignments,…

The first of a two-volume final report, this document focuses on a study of written language growth and development among 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year old children. The first section of the document contains five essays dealing with race, sex, age, socioeconomic status, and language; orchestrating the literacy event; reading and writing as…

Intended to help writing teachers better understand how to help students effectively revise their written work, this book contains essays that, as a group, focus on the problem of the definition of revision. The first half of the book discusses the background of revision, while the second half discusses contexts and techniques for application. The…

Prepared as part of a project designed to provide an objectively measured indication of the quality of student writing in one school district, this paper presents analyses of the syntactic complexity of the argumentative and narrative writing of more than 500 seventh and eighth grade students and of the mechanical errors found in that writing.…

The 42 papers in this volume discuss a variety of technical writing topics. The following are some of these topics: (1) industry's views on new directions in technical communication, and the technical writing skills that industry needs; (2) an interdisciplinary approach to teaching technical report writing in the community college; (3) designing…

The essays composed by 84 remedial and 77 nonremedial college freshmen were analyzed for some features proposed by Mina Shaughnessy as being characteristic of basic writers. The students were enrolled in either a beginning remedial class (098), a class at the next level of remediation (099), or a regular English class (101). The essays were…

A study was conducted to determine if and how teachers changed as a result of participating in a National Writing Project summer institute. The study investigated the process of change as based on reports of 16 elementary through college level teacher-consultants who attended the institute. The decision-making operation process of the teachers to…

Six judges evaluated 20 randomly selected essays from a remedial writing program at the University of Houston to study racial differences in writing and the reasons for such differences. The judges, who were not informed of the race of the writers, examined the essays for the following writing features: free associations, redundancy (ineffective…

The development of the City University of New York's writing assessment test is discussed in this paper. Its relationship to the total freshman skills assessment program, which also involves the assessment of minimal competencies in mathematics and reading, is related. The discussion of the test includes descriptions of the test development…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the impact of cognitive development upon audience awareness in the writing process, (2) a theory of college composition and academic prose, (3) public…

In an informal experiment, ten pairs of passages covering a range of writing (poems, narrative prose, legal writing, "educationalese," anthropology, and literary criticism) were presented to two sections of freshman English and two sections of a graduate seminar in which the students were primarily experienced high school and college…

Forty-eight American (L1) and 48 Dutch students (L2), half of whom had computer science backgrounds and half of whom did not, were tested for their use of either scientific text (ST) syntactic structures or the less difficult common syntax when writing technical discourse (in Appendix). Results indicate that both L1 and L2 technical writers wrote…

Reviews recent research showing that creative composition should begin in kindergarten. Presents practical ways teachers can help young children learn to write and thus to read. (FL)

Describes a small, decentralized, flexible program for training instructors of freshman composition. Recommends ways to capture the flavor of small programs in larger university settings. (SKC)

Addresses the problem of how to motivate revision of papers, such as informational reports, whose topics generate low student interest. Suggests stimulating activities, varied approaches to assigning and presenting topics, and gives examples of some successful assignments. (JG)