Designed to develop students' abilities to follow directions and organize and write their thoughts, this junior high level activity involves students in creating a dream person using magazine or catalog pictures and then writing a biography of this person. Materials include teacher notes, follow-up suggestions, evaluation procedure, and a…

To develop a profile of inhouse, company teachers of technical communication, a six-page questionnaire was administered to technical writing teachers. Of the 52 respondents, 24 offered both formal inhouse courses and informal training while 22 conducted only formal courses. Titles, course outlines, and other survey comments revealed that many…

The demand for skilled technical editors is growing as society places increasing emphasis on receiving accurate, concise, and complete technical data. Since many organizations do not have inhouse programs for training technical editors, a need exists to provide inexperienced people with basic editing skills. One organization has developed two…

Divided into two sections, this report outlines several components of computer based instruction in the composing process. The first section, which focuses on the use of computers in editing, generating ideas, and producing text, presents a users' manual for composition instruction on a microcomputer, a general description of how computer based…

Reading activities designed for parents to use with preschool through high school age children are provided in this guide. Activities for children below the junior high level predominate. Jean Piaget's child development theories are briefly outlined. Suggested reading activities, language activities, and children's books are listed for use with…

Attempting to place in an American context many of the ideas about the teaching of writing that were first developed in England, this book contains contributions from internationally prominent teachers/scholars who attended the New York University-CBS Sunrise Semester course on learning to write and writing to learn. The text also reflects the…

Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

Information on a Northern Kentucky University course entitled "The Mind of the University" is presented in several articles. After Darryl Poole briefly discusses the origins of the course, H. L. Wallace describes the background of the project, course themes, class materials, and testing/grading. The objective of the course is defined as…

Intended to help teachers, administrators, and others improve oral and written communication programs in their schools and districts, this report provides a starting point for program review. Various sections of the report contain (1) copies of the Washington State Board of Education Goals for the Common Schools, and oral and written…

A study examined the effect of role playing on persuasive letters written by 84 fourth and 70 eighth graders. Role playing was defined as improvised, unrehearsed oral interaction in a simulated context. Randomly selected students from 11 comparable heterogeneous classes in a middle-class suburb wrote to their school principals on three different…

Interdepartmental rivalries between literature instruction and composition instruction have contributed to viewing reading and writing as disconnected activities. One solution to this divisiveness is a course in "the journal as a literary tradition," which combines reading and writing in equal portions. Students first learn about the…

This document explains the Pittsburgh Literacy Initiative (PLI), what role it plays in workplace literacy, what mechanisms it has used, and what has been learned. Section 1 lists the five aspects of the initiative's mission: clearinghouse, screening center, program development, data collection, and literacy promotion. Section 2 describes the…

A study examined a number of concepts drawn from recent research on the social contexts of writing as it is conducted in academic and professional communities to determine how novice writers learn the rhetorical and linguistic conventions that constitute specialized, disciplinary literacy. These concepts were applied to a close inspection of three…

A study was conducted to evaluate the final outcome of the Section 98 writing project, a 3-year collaboration between the School District of the City of Saginaw and the University of Michigan, and to successfully employ the gap reduction design with the pre- to post-test results stemming from the writing project. Students in six sections of…

A study examined: (1) what concepts of authorship were revealed in the oral and written language of children engaged in a bookmaking task and pre- and post-bookmaking interviews; and (2) how these concepts differ for good readers and writers in different grades. The study was conducted at two elementary schools in a small, middle-class Texas city.…