Intended as a practical guide for persons interested in the field of free lance writing, this book provides information on the following topics: the individual's response to the magazine publishing market; magazines and the types of articles that are marketable; methods for locating story material; ways of questioning and interpreting an editor's…

In the student-oriented approach to writing business letters, students work in small groups to write a series of letters. For the first letter, the groups take the role of consumers, writing letters to order merchandise. The letters are written on overhead transparencies and are then critiqued by the other teams, with an emphasis on constructive…

To determine specific objectives for language arts programs in Alberta schools, a study was conducted in which a comprehensive list of specific objectives was compiled for use in developing tests of reading and writing in grades three, six, nine, and twelve. Measurable objectives were ranked in terms of their importance to the total program, and…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…

Organized in two parts, this packet provides a rationale for teaching language arts according to a multisensory approach and outlines specific activities for use in the elementary classroom. The first section concentrates on constructing a classroom environment that develops language skills through the use of resources that stimulate thought,…

Intended for students in regular and advanced composition classes, each of the four controlled composition exercises presented in this paper aims at teaching writing style through carefully constructed short passages that concentrate on an isolated problem in style such as parallel structure, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses, and…

In a small informal study of the process of children's writing, three children, aged 9, 10, and 11, were observed as they wrote. Specifically, the study sought to discover how the children approached the task of writing, the manner and extent of their interaction, and the result of this interaction upon their writing. Each child's writing was also…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

In contrast to a speech-act theory that is limited by a simple speaker/hearer relationship, a text-act theory of written language allows for the historical or personal context of a writer and reader, both in the written work itself and in the act of reading. This theory can be applied to theme writing, essay examinations, and revision in the…

Intended as an aid to language arts curriculum development, the four sections of this guide present, in chart form, a sequential set of learning outcomes and assessment levels for the skills of writing, speaking/listening, critical thinking, and reading. (FL)

A study was undertaken to discover clues to the learning processes of college students by exploring a method for locating and analyzing student initiated concerns about writing in student/teacher writing conferences. Four tapes of teacher conferences with two students from the first and last of a semester were analyzed in depth. It was noted that…

A 12-item survey of English background and proficiency was administered to all Washington State University freshman English students on the first day of class during the fall semester of 1977. A sample of 700 completed questionnaires was selected for analysis. In general, student responses indicated an overall weakness in the teaching of writing…

A dialectical heuristic that can be used to guide students through the stages of writing about a literary experience is discussed in this paper. The first section of the paper provides a working definition of literature as an area of discourse and divides the process of reading and writing about literature into three general phases: progressive,…

The issues and problems confronted by a professor of literature when asked to teach a technical writing course for engineers are related in this paper. The first section of the paper explains how the professor was "recycled" from a teacher of literature to a professor of technical writing at his college. The second section describes some of the…

The four articles in this monograph are concerned with why it is important to teach composition and with identifying the characteristics of "good" writing. The first article presents an argument for a curriculum that stresses many kinds and purposes of writing so as to produce writers who respond with freedom and diversity to a variety of writing…