"Engineering Report Writing," a required course in the Civil Engineering Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, combines both pragmatic and innovative assignments that teach the techniques of technical writing. Course design and success are discussed. (LBH)

Presents background information on Chinese writing, discusses its defects, suggests how to develop Chinese writing, and offers opinions about research in Chinese writing. (Author/DB)

This article discusses the problem of choosing a language style for literary purposes in Quebec. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Describes an analysis of the content of the CLEP General Examination in English Composition which found that the emphasis is placed on the student's knowledge of standard written English. (MB)

This review of findings in the field of readability research discusses the differences in meaning between readability and legibility, examines the origins and developments of readability formulas for children's and adult materials, and describes several of the best-known formulas for English-language materials. (46 references) (Author/LRW)

EKTB, a new transliteration scheme for Hebrew based on the historical development of the alphabet, treats Latin characters as graphic variants of Hebrew letters and permits Hebrew to be used with standard equipment while maintaining its traditional writing methodology. (Author/CB)

Shows, on empirical grounds, that a verb phrase (VP) is absent in the Arabic sentence structure through specific examination of the language's syntactic property. (CB)

Recent changes in French grammatical and spelling conventions not generally known in North America are outlined, including instances of gender and number agreement, plurals of hyphenated words, articles, numerical adjectives, indefinites, verb forms, and accent marks. (MSE)

Discusses three principles germane to the idea that writing is a response to its function, compares school writing with home writing, and suggests specific functions of writing that are frequently used in classrooms. (DF)

Describes a study of writing samples of three-, four-, and five-year-olds enrolled in the University of Virginia's child development center. In addition, the children were asked to draw pictures, write about them, read what they had written, and respond to questions gauging their knowledge of written language. (CT)

Using Hindi and Urdu as examples, illustrates the shortcomings in the definition of South Asian languages that has been attempted in Britain so far. Argues that description and definition of a language have to include aspects of culture, religion, script, politics, and the speakers' own perception of their language and language choice. (SED)

Using Susanne Langer's concepts of presentational and discursive symbolism, constructs a theory of text production that describes presentation and discourse and relations between them as major components in the evolution of text from thought to written language. Concludes by examining the implications of this theory for understanding students'…

Concludes that there are about 88,500 words in printed school English and that even systematic direct vocabulary instruction could not account for a significant proportion of all the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading materials. (FL)

Reviews the psycholinguistic view of the relationship between reading and written and spoken language and presents teaching strategies for beginning readers based on this view. (FL)

Notes that considerations of audience awareness are receiving increased attention in composition theory and teaching. Argues that while audience awareness is often conceived as a unitary, global construct, it in fact has distinctly identifiable dimensions. Discusses the dimensions of social cognition along with their interaction with the composing…