This case study measured the effectiveness of a writing strategy designed to enhance the organization and cohesion of paragraphs written by four students with writing difficulties who are currently enrolled in a resource program. The strategy steps were taught through a mnemonic in which steps beginning with each letter of UNITE provided an…

Participants imagined, drew, and wrote about novel alien creatures (cf. Ward, 1994). Judges rated the creativity of the drawings alone, paragraphs alone, or drawings and paragraphs together. Much prior research has examined how participants rely on available exemplars and categorical knowledge in this task; here we focus on understanding why some…

The current standards-based reform movement, which emphasizes teaching academic skills to all students, holds promise for students with disabilities. However, there is concern that this movement's sole focus on academic skills will leave less room for teaching self-determination skills. One possible solution is to identify interventions that can…

Describes how to conduct timed writing exercises which extend into proofreading, correcting, and paragraphing exercises. (RH)

Uses the paragraph as an approach to teaching students the basic structural unit of both imaginative and more practical types of writing. (Author/RK)

This article describes a project which identified the skills and abilities in written literacy of pre-service teachers, as well as their needs in this area. An intervention to address their needs is evaluated and its outcomes assessed, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results show that it is possible to improve these…

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

This new edition, intended to help the student achieve a simple and clear writing style, contains new material--chapters on the research paper and on the resume and application letter, an appendix on parts of speech, and a number of revision-practice sentences. The three sections of the book deal with preparations for writing, explanations and…

FOUR PASSAGES OF EXPOSITORY PROSE WERE ANALYZED IN TERMS OF EXTRA-SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN THREE SYSTEMS--LEXICAL, GRAMMATICAL, AND RHETORICAL. NONSENSE WORDS WERE SUBSTITUTED FOR ALL CONTENT WORDS IN EACH PASSAGE, GRAMMATICAL ENDINGS ON WORDS WERE RETAINED, AND PARAGRAPH INDENTIONS WERE REMOVED. FORTY-EIGHT COLLEGE UNDERGRADUATES WERE INSTRUCTED TO…

Presents writing as a form of dialog and the paragraph as a unit of implied dialog. (MM)

Keeping the content of two paragraphs identical, the author varied their forms using the Functional Sentence Perspectivists' Rule (FSPR) for relating old and new information within the sentences. In subjective readability decisions, a significant number of 272 high school subjects found the rule-governed paragraph more readable than the variant.…