Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

A method called "Objectives-Art," by which disadvantaged students in a community college can be taught to structure paragraphs, is described. Works of art are intended to be a stimulus to the student's sense of unity between form and content, and the objectives are aimed at transferring the student's perception of form and unity into a process…

Suggests using visual cues such as boldface type, indenting, and color coding to help students identify important words in sentences and relationships between sentences. (MKM)

Offers a four-step procedure that can be used to help upper elementary school students learn to write a well-structured expository paragraph. Suggests that the writing experience is a bridge to understanding more difficult text structure. (FL)

Warns against the overuse of cohesive conjunctions in writing and recommends that teachers instruct students on contextual use of conjunctions rather than on their random use. (CRH)

The back-to-basics movement and arguments by its proponents are examined with emphasis on proficiency in writing skills. Composition course requirements are discussed along with the need of instructors to teach semantic and logical skills. (LBH)

Explores findings from research on the psychology of reading that may confirm and enlarge upon both the importance of planning and the perceptions of plans in writing and reading. (RL)

Four eighth-grade students with learning disabilities were taught paragraph-writing skills using a metacognitive text structure strategy, which included an outline as a paragraph planning guide. Results suggest that when provided with such direct, intensive instruction, these students can improve their paragraph writing. (Author/MSE)

This paper examines research studies, which focus on interventions commonly used with students who are learning disabled and identifies effective methods that produce substantial benefits concerning reading comprehension. This paper synthesizes previous observation studies by conducting a meta-analysis of strategies used to improve the reading…

Designed to provide an introduction to study skills for students in the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades, this teacher's guide provides a series of 12 activity-oriented units, most of which require one period of class time. The units in the guide cover the following topics: (1) learning to listen, (2) vocabulary (getting meaning from context), (3)…

A heuristic procedure can be used to teach organizational skills to students of technical writing. Designed to allow students on their own to explore ways that numbers can be used to give a definite shape to technical information, its central feature is a matrix composed of a series of control numbers (horizontal axis) and organizing concerns…

One portion of a course in English for Science and Technology (EST) designed for foreign nuclear engineers studying at Oregon State University dealt with the conceptual paragraph, considered a basic unit of discourse in EST. The conceptual paragraph is defined as a group of rhetorically related concepts developing a generalization to form a…

Designed to help teachers find an effective approach in teaching expository writing, this guide divides expository writing into five main types: definition/classification, comparison/contrast, thesis/proof, problem/solution, and inference (drawing conclusions). Five different starter techniques are presented with each of the five main types of…