Information-structuring courses offered at the Asian Institute of Technology (Bangkok, Thailand) present concepts, patterns, hypotheses, and procedures for discussion on the basis that their consideration can contribute to better idea organization, text production, and text interpretation for engineering and other technology students learning…

Research-based recommendations for an effective writing instruction program for exceptional students include, among others, allocate a sufficient amount of instruction time; expose students to a broad range of writing tasks; integrate writing with other academic subjects; develop the processes of planning, sentence generation, and revising; and…

Investigates the quality of 800 business letters using 43 business communication and writing deficiency criteria placed within one of the following categories: form, grammar, content, sequencing, and style. (NKA)

Proposes a new way of discussing the writing process by drawing a line between Piaget's cognitive egocentrism and Vygotsky's inner speech. (FL)

Recounts the problems encountered over a period of time in dealing with a particularly difficult and unruly class, and finds that the writing process helped to close the gap between teacher expectations and student apathy. (NKA)

The Developmental Writing Program process curriculum model was developed to teach writing to elementary students. It combines prewriting, drafting, editing/revising, and publishing/sharing. A staff development model has also been developed and includes three components: administrator and staff orientation, teacher training, and on-site program…

Lists and discusses nine classroom practices designed to support writing as a process. (SRT)

Advocates using unassigned, student-generated topics for writing assignments. (EL)

Contrasts the revising patterns of junior high school students when they used a word processor and pens and paper. Concludes that those who used a word processing program added more words to the ends of their texts and corrected more errors, but did not make more global text revisions than when they used a pen. (HOD)

Describes the attempt to define and to understand composition studies. Discusses problems involving its becoming a discipline and describes current writing programs based on a survey of 52 universities. (EL)

Explores the analogy between teaching writing and teaching virtue and concludes that teaching writing with its focus on practical reasoning and prudence is bound up in similar ways with teaching moral goodness. (PD)

Describes the Colorado Writing Assessment Program, a testing program that provides two kinds of feedback to teachers and students: (1) a holistic score that measures the general quality of writing and (2) a set of scores on analytic scales that reflect students' achievement in four areas. Concludes that the program works. (FL)

Examines flaws in the literature of dialect interference, examines the seven correlates of Patrick Hartwell's print code hypothesis and finds them wanting or uninstructive, and sets forth suggestions for a more sophisticated study of this issue. (HOD)

Presents a model of the writing process using three stages of drafting: zero drafting--the discovery and initial realization of the topic; problem solving drafting--the identification and resolution of major conceptual and organizational problems; and final drafting--the attempt to arrive at the best possible solution to a rhetorical problem. (MM)

Reviews the development of composition research and suggests ways to forestall minimum competency policies in writing instruction. (AEA)