RHETORICIANS HAVE MAINTAINED THAT A SKILL IS ACQUIRED BY STUDYING THEORY, IMITATING THE ACTS OF OTHERS, AND PRACTICING REPEATEDLY. ALTHOUGH ALL THREE ACTIVITIES FALL WITHIN THE SCOPE OF THE COMPOSITION COURSE, THEORY AND IMITATION, IN MOST INSTANCES, RECEIVE THE MOST CLASSROOM TIME. IDEALLY, THESE TWO SHOULD BE PRESENTED IN COMBINATION THROUGH A…

The first part of the article briefly discusses the means of motivating teenage students to write a successful research paper. Suggestions focus on encouraging students to choose topics dealing with the adolescent social and psychological problems which vitally concern them. The major portion of the article consists of "An Annotated Bibliography…

A Color Association Exercise (CAE) with four scales (Originality, Abstraction, Fluency, and Elaboration) was devised to assess verbal creative ability. When administered to 173 adolescent students, the Color Association Exercise appeared to have only moderate potential as an assessment technique for verbal creative ability. Abstraction and…

This paper presents a passage written by a student and analyzes the way in which each sentence is or is not connected to those before it and after it, revealing the problems that cause the passage to lack coherence. The paper notes that, although this writer would have benefited from an opportunity to talk out her ideas (rather than a lesson in…

This paper cites articles in the popular press that agree that there is a "writing crisis" in the United States, and it notes the lack of general agreement on solutions for the problem. Articles by writers in the English profession are then examined with reference to the writers' views on the seriousness of the writing crisis, reasons…

English 1002, an advanced college composition course, is based on the Foxfire Project (in which Appalachian students interview elderly persons about mountain crafts and lore). After two weeks of classroom drill and practice in composition skills, each student is matched with a resident of a home for the elderly, located near the campus. During…

Tagmemic invention offers a student several ways of decreasing the unfamiliarity of the early stages of writing. The process of inquiry and the heuristic devices provide the orientation and tools for dealing with new writing tasks with increased confidence and likelihood of success. In the theory of tagmemic rhetoric, language behavior and…

The word "grammar" can be defined in at least four different ways: "intuitive grammar," our intuitive sense of sentence structure; "effective grammar," a command of the syntactic resources of the language; "'good' grammar," the use of socially prestigious grammar; and "formal grammar," the systematic study of the structure of the language. Formal…

In order to establish the need for a remedial writing program at Pensacola Junior College and to demonstrate the need for faculty released time for materials development, a diagnostic English skills test was administered to 215 freshmen. Test results showed 93% needed remediation. Questionnaire responses of English faculty members showed all 15…

The paper offers guidelines to prospective authors on how to write for publication in journals or monographs. People generally seem to write because of a desire to share an idea, for financial reasons, for ego gratification, for professional advancement, or for a combination of these reasons. Steps in preparing a manuscript include storing notes…

Although traditional composition instruction has moved from an emphasis on skill practice for writing in other disciplines to an emphasis on writing as a personal communication process, the increasing demands for clear technical writing and the current attacks on jargon require that English departments further define and outline composition…

The introductory essay of this book states that the value of formal and generic analysis must be tested heuristically, in application. With that value as the keynote to the essay collection, the theoretical perspectives of form and genre in rhetorical criticism are discussed, and five critical essays give evidence of the constraints and creative…

The purpose of the study was to determine the regional extent of the syndrome of writing inadequacy among students in first-year college and university composition classes, to identify and categorize errors, to determine what instructors as well as students felt about first-year composition inadequacies, and to provide a profile of composition…

In order to indicate the severity of a student's writing difficulties, this paper reproduces portions of his written work in a remedial composition course and examines the following corrective measures attempted by the instructor: shortening all writing assignments, using exercises from basic grammar texts, studying examples of the student's…

Twenty chapters, each about specific aspects of public relations, are organized in a pocket book. Do-it-yourself examinations appear at the end of each lesson and will be graded with comments by the publisher for $5.00. The lessons cover such topics as working with newspapers, preparing news releases, writing features and straight news, arranging…