Discusses how narrators (distinct from authors) emerged in English prose works during the last decade of the sixteenth century. Reports that instances of the use of narrators can be found throughout the seventeenth century, but that it was another hundred years before the technique developed fully enough to constitute a recognizable narrative…

Maintains that journalism skills courses must also impart to students a sense of the splendid power of language and the artisanship of molding clear ideas with words. Points out that it is up to the teacher of news writing to remind future journalists of their rich language heritage. (SR)

Reports a study of students' ability to write argumentative prose. Examines the knowledge students used to judge the quality of seven constructed arguments. Concludes that while older students were more effective in writing arguments, all students' judgments about arguments were similar to adults'. (SR)

Third graders produced narrative or descriptive passages in response to prompt words. Results supported the domain-specific view of production, in which content elaboration occurs across repeated productions when there is a connection between the earlier and the later production and that connection is based on semantic similarity. (ME)

Discusses publishing on the Internet by young authors. Describes "fan-fiction" Web sites where fans write passages that link to characters in popular books, television shows, or movies; fan-fiction inspired by the Disney film "Newsies"; posting short stories on Web pages; poetry, book reviews, and other publications; the attraction of the Internet…

This article discusses the author's experience of teaching Edgar Allan Poe as part of the American literature survey at Elmira College in Elmira, New York. While his specialty is Mark Twain, his students would be much happier if they could skip the colonial and national period, and move directly to studying Poe. In this article, the author…

In 1993, under contract from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Educational Testing Service assessed the literacy proficiencies of a nationally representative sample of all adults, aged 16 and over, from nearly 27,000 homes. That assessment, the National Adult Literacy Survey, produced a profile of the English literacy skills of the…

The notion that student generated questions or instructor generated questions of a recalled prose passage will better aid learning is examined. (DEP)

Two experiments examined children's ability to apply three different standards for evaluating their understanding. Five-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children were presented with short narrative passages within which were embedded three types of problems (nonsense words, internal inconsistencies, and prior knowledge violations), each of…

Interest in mathemagenics (adjunct aids used in text to enhance learning) has most likely resulted from the indirect effects of inserted postquestions, whereby the learning of unquestioned material is enhanced as well as that of questioned material. However, since most mathemagenics research has occurred in laboratory settings in which subjects…

Drawing from the conclusions of research studies by linguists and psychologists, this paper describes four classes of principles for constructing readable prose for both print materials and computer screens: (1) global principles dealing with a schema-theory approach to discourse type, with topical focus, and with parallelism; (2) sentence-level…

A total of 150 undergraduate students randomly assigned to five experimental groups studied ten paragraphs with questions interspersed at different locations in the text. Performance on incidental items was significantly lower (p < .05) in the question before (QB) than in the question after (QA), question before and after (QBA), and the…

Investigates the effect of instructional strategy and relevant drawings on a task requiring the processing of verbal information rather than direct recall. (Author/DEP)

Results confirm that poetry is produced at a younger age than prose, that achieved imminence and life span are positive determinants of the modal productive age, and that these relationships are cross culturally and trans-historically invariant. (Author/AM)