Twenty 10th grade students participated in a study designed to identify differences in the ways developing writers use words to create written texts. Essays written by the students were holistically evaluated and then analyzed for the types and the number of lexical cohesive ties used and the nature of the grammatical subject, or focus, of each…

Supporting the contention that using experimental research designs will facilitate sound decisions about how to teach the composing process, this paper first describes briefly the range of research methods available for investigating the writing process. Next the paper discusses the advantages of conducting experimental research, some of which are…

A survey of student writing in every subject and grade in a Canadian secondary school involved 117 students over a nine-day period and investigated the amount of writing done in all subjects and the variety of purpose and audience in student writing. Results showed that each student produced an average of two written pieces per day, that one out…

This report contains information on the 1980 Basic Skills Assessment Writing Sample that the New Mexico State Department of Education administered to over 1,000 tenth grade students. Sections of the report provide the following information: (1) background data and an explanation of holistic scoring, which was used in the assessment; (2)…

A taxonomy of revision changes was developed and applied to 18 case studies of writers' revisions. Subjects were six inexperienced student-writers, six advanced student-writers, and six expert adult-writers. The primary distinction of the taxonomy was between surface (formal and meaning-preserving) revisions and text-base (microstructure and…

A study examined student writing from the point of view of each of three language functions: the expressive function (the evidence of the individual writer), the appeal function (evidence of a particular listener or audience), and the representative function (attention to the topic). While speaking, students have a clear sense of the three…

A study was conducted to examine the effects of sentence combining instruction on the writing performance of both black students and students from small high schools enrolled in freshman composition classes. Subjects were 56 students enrolled in two sections of freshman composition, with one section receiving practice in sentence combining. The…

What little research that has been undertaken regarding the handwriting competence of preservice teachers indicates a decline in the legibility of teachers' handwriting, as well as that of students. With this in mind, a study was conducted to identify methods used in training preservice teachers to teach handwriting, to note changes in the teacher…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

The model for teaching reading and writing as integrated processes advocated in this paper is based on a holistic understanding of composing. Psycholinguistics, cognitive theory, and composing research are reviewed extensively in an attempt to clarify their theoretical implications for teachers of composing. Concepts discussed as applicable to an…

This final report summarizes an extensive evaluation of the COMP-LAB project, a course which integrates carefully defined classroom instruction with an autotutorial writing laboratory for teaching basic writing and rhetoric, particularly to students impaired by foreign language or nonstandard speech. Information on the project background and the…

The key ideas developed by the Writing across the Curriculum Project begun at the University of London in 1965 center on the ways in which discourse is acquired by children in a psycholinguistic sense. Among those ideas are (1) knowledge is socially determined through the interweaving of individual consciousnesses, each of which is busy construing…

There are three standard complaints given by teachers of freshman composition: (1) college freshman students are inferior to English majors and graduate students, or inferior to freshmen from when the teachers were in college; (2) the subject matter of a writing course is inferior to that of literature courses; and (3) those who teach composition…

Recent research supports the theory that unskilled writers produce writing through the mediation of spoken language. That is, their writing contains inexplicit meanings, or semantic abbreviations, characteristic of conversations in which the listener is familiar with the situational and cultural contexts of the monologue. Two studies further…

It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…