Intended for teachers, this monograph argues that, unlike the structured, formulaic "school" essay, personal essays in the manner of Michel de Montaigne lead students to explore their connections with ideas and texts. The monograph describes several strategies which use writing as a tool for critical thinking. The monograph contains the…

This report describes the Prescriptions for Better Writing Program, a 9-week writing skills curriculum, suitable for seventh to ninth grade levels, developed by teachers in New Jersey's Lower Camden County's Regional High School District No. 1. The program was designed for two purposes: to remediate to ninth grade levels and designed for two…

This professional development package is designed to assist General Educational Development (GED) instructors in developing teaching skills to help them prepare students for the written essay part of the new GED exam. An introduction discusses some research and theory that support collaborative teaching situations that most efficiently and…

By using microcomputers, functional learning environments can be created in which reading and writing are arranged for communicative purposes and used as electronic workbooks for basic skills instruction. However, the "Computer Chronicles Newswire Network" goes a step further by giving students a goal for writing: to share their ideas…

A study examined the attitudes of pre-service secondary teachers toward "writing-to-learn" before and after a compulsory course on language across the curriculum. Subjects, 90 graduates of arts, sciences, social studies, music, business, and physical education programs, recorded their attitudes and understanding of writing to learn at…

This paper considers the integration of reading and writing into elementary science teaching by way of the implications of two leading theories pertaining to literacy: metacognitive theory and whole language theory. Discussion of the implications of metacognition includes attention to the issue of helping to overcome readers' nonscientific…

Invisible writing is a technique whereby the composer writes with an empty ballpoint pen on a blank piece of paper backed by a piece of carbon paper and a bottom blank sheet. An informal experiment in which graduate students used the invisible writing technique was conducted to replicate earlier studies indicating that invisible writing is…

Under the leadership of the Language Arts Curriculum Committee, the Greater Albany (Oregon) Public Schools conducted a district assessment of writing skills of students in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11, using the "analytic trait scoring" method (ATS). The testing procedure conformed to the writing process implemented through the district's Real…

Community college students tend to perceive a gap between their current writing ability and the level of writing skill they expect to need as employees in the future. Unfortunately, college composition classes generally do a poor job of capitalizing on the true value of writing to career development, and fail to have students practice the kind of…

Intended to aid new academic professionals, this annotated bibliography lists a wide variety of books and articles, from the very general to the very specific, that deal with professional academic writing and publishing. Arranged alphabetically by author, each of the 225 annotations supplies a brief summary of the contents and date of publication,…

Noting that Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in writing are relatively new as compared to similar programs in dance, music, and painting, and that little is known about the writing progams by those not directly involved, a study sought to determine if (1) the MFA program in writing is a fairly standard entity from program to program, and (2) if…

Many learning disabled students attending Avocado Elementary School in Homestead, Florida, were unable to write legibly when taught with available cursive handwriting programs. To redress the problem, a complete, sequential cursive handwriting program was devised for use with learning disabled and other students. The program combined tracing and…

Recent research on children learning to write, coming from a mix of disciplines (English education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and rhetoric), is described in this volume. The introduction, by Marcia Farr, emphasizes how the research contributes to understanding (1) of research methodology and theoretical frameworks, and (2) of…

Created as one part of a comprehensive curriculum for teaching writing from kindergarten through twelfth grade, this guide focuses on expressive writing. Following an introduction describing the goals of the writing project, the preface points out that the guide is based on the comprehensive model of James Kinneavy's "A Theory of Discourse,…

The fourth part of a four-year K-12 curriculum guide project for teaching writing, this guide deals with the literary aim (or purpose) for creating composition--which challenges the individual to develop a creative style found in the novel, short story, drama, or poem, and which encompasses both fiction and nonfiction. The preface explains that…