The "controlling statement," a method of teaching students to write in an organized and efficient manner, consists of three basic parts: the idea, the viewpoint, and the key terms. Once introduced to students, these three parts can be easily used throughout the year (or years) to refer to basic areas within the composition process. This method of…

The study investigated the use of repeated writings as a means of increasing written language fluency with 48 learning disabled students in senior high school resource room English classes. Subjects received one of four treatments for 4 days: repeated writing with structural cues, repeated revision with structural cues, writing on a new topic with…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

THIS PAPER DEALS WITH SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF RHETORICAL FORM AND STRUCTURE. THE SUGGESTION IS MADE THAT THE FIRST CONSIDERATION IS A DEFINITION OF THE ENTITY--THE EFFECTIVE STIMULUS--TO WHICH THE S (SUBJECT) RESPONDS. THIS MEANS A SPECIFICATION OF FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT, IN WHICH THE S VIEWS A GIVEN LANGUAGE PERFORMANCE. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL…

THIS IS THE REPORT OF A COMMITTEE WHICH IDENTIFIED FIVE STUDIES WHICH IN ITS OPINION WERE SOUNDLY BASED UPON CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTATION AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS. THE FIVE STUDIES ARE BRIEFLY SUMMARIZED AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF EACH FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF TEACHING ENGLISH COMPOSITION ARE PRESENTED. (JK)

This volume is intended for practicing and prospective teachers at the elementary level through the graduate level who are involved in helping others learn how to write. The 35 articles collected here are organized according to the following section headings: "Introduction,""Motivating Student Writing,""A Reluctant Medium: The Sentence,""The…

Explains the use of templates in teaching developmental writing students about the physical structure of the traditional expository paragraph. The template approach offers a space corresponding to a 150-word paragraph with structural suggestions in the margins (e.g., Do you have a strong opening sentence? Do you need a transition?). (DMM)

Examines prevailing definitions of coherence in text. Cites writing samples from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to illustrate how coherence at the paragraph level must supersede coherence between sentences. (HTH)

A principal components analysis was conducted to determine whether the measures of essays made by the computer could be grouped into factors. Six factors (fluency, spelling, diction, sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraphing) were identified. (Author)

Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

Argues that generative rhetoric can lead technical writing students to produce more effective and better developed business reports. (TJ)

Illustrates how a controlled writing exercise for students of English as a second language can be used to help native speakers of English learn paragraph development. (TJ)