Because good future studies and good fiction have a great deal in common, futurists need to recognize and apply the skills of word artists from all genres, particularly novelists and short-story writers. One form of science fiction that futurists could use is the scenario, which is an exploration of an alternative future. A good scenario should be…

A study documenting and describing dialogue journal writing in a group of nine tenth graders in an Australian secondary school English class is reported. The overall purpose was to understand the nature of dialogue journal writing and to assess its value as a suitable mode of encouraging writing among secondary students. Specific aspects of…

A writing-across-the-curriculum program has been initiated at the East Campus of Pima Community College in an effort to improve student literacy. The program operates in the following manner: (1) faculty in all disciplines on campus are asked to get involved in the program, those who participate being paid a one-time fee of $100 for their efforts;…

Since acceptable writing is essential to success in job training programs and in many entry-level jobs, a writing sample was included in the Training and Employment Prerequisites Survey, a multiple-choice test about skills like mechanics, usage, and spelling. The two writing prompts asked students to give directions for finding a location in a…

Intended for students taking the Grade 3 Language Arts Achievement Test in Alberta, Canada, this booklet contains the writing portion of the test, which requires the student to write an imaginative composition in response to a brief passage. The booklet contains space both for planning the composition and for writing the finished work. (EL)

A study was conducted to examine children's developing perceptions of contextual factors surrounding their writing at home and at school. Subjects were 20 children from grades one through five, who wrote in a wide range of contexts. Children's writing products for three months were labeled for ownership, setting, audience, purpose, and genre,…

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Elementary language arts programs demand a balanced use of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (JH)

This paper discusses four strategies used by the author in college English courses to discourage fraud yet to allow students enough freedom to conduct original research. The strategies include generating "topic lists," in hope of beating term paper "clearinghouses," which must certainly have a time-lag on the topics in their…

Students in a freshman composition course at William Jewell College write compositions during each class period and discuss their papers in weekly individual conferences with the instructor. The instructor reads the papers during the conferences and then stresses the strengths of the students' writing and points out patterns in the weaknesses.…

Francis Christensen's Rhetoric Program stresses narrative-descriptive and expository writing, and offers a guide for the structure of the paragraph. In this approach, students develop their composition skills by writing sentences similar to model sentences that Christensen has extracted from the works of successful writers. The basic model is the…

This inventory is designed to enable high school equivalency instructors to profile a student's competencies in the English skills that need to be mastered requisite to passing the General Educational Development (GED) writing skills test. The inventory contains 101 items, tailored specifically item-by-item to 35 skills tested. The skills involve…