Analyzes cases published in the March 1998 special issue of this journal and contrasts them with results of a survey of 25 employees regarding the kinds of writing that are important to successful performance at work. Finds the cases involve exceptional rhetorical situations when in reality the rhetorical situations business writers usually face…

Describes as a prewriting strategy the use of seventh-grade language-arts student and teacher story telling about "guilt trips" played by parents and teens. Maintains that this is a useful prewriting strategy often neglected as teachers move to a process-oriented instructional model. Describes pitfalls to the verbal prewriting strategy. (KB)

Describes a fifth-grade teacher's year-long unit of study on memoir. Addresses getting started, mini-lessons, drafting, and embellishment and voice. Notes that even reluctant writers became involved in writing memoirs and that the teacher followed her own advice and began writing a memoir about her grandmother. Appends a rubric for evaluating…

Discusses ways to make writing enjoyable by making it significant. Journal writing became the means for encouraging students in one English-as-a-Second-Language class to write more. (Author/VWL)

Describes how and why the author has students in his composition classes collaboratively create scoring guides. Argues that this focuses students on the goals of the paper and provides a clear notion of how to improve their own performance. Offers scoring guides. Comments on the process that created them. Offers guidelines for using scoring guides…

Describes how the author developed an approach to teaching writing and to grading student writing that gets students themselves to understand their technical mistakes in using language, but also lets them know the strengths in their writing upon which they can build. Notes that this approach unexpectedly cut down on the time she spent reading and…

Describes how a high school English teacher set up a project to help students who made frequent conventional errors become more aware of them, choose goals based on their own writing weaknesses, collect data, work toward improvement, and assess their success. Argues that, while not all students are reached, the climate of the classroom is…

Describes how the author uses reading response journals in her composition classes. Shows how it actively engages students in the reading/writing process, and how students learn careful, active reading and develop confidence generating ideas and formulating opinions via the structure, freedom, enhanced comprehension, critical thinking, and…

Evaluates a three-year pilot project in mainstreaming basic writers at the City University of New York. Suggests that the social and political contexts of a project need to be taken into account in the earliest stages of evaluation. Claims the empirically verifiable account that researchers sought was compromised by the socio-political forces…

Describes a program where at-risk fifth-grade students were treated to a writing program that utilized prewriting activities to see if their written expression and writing anxiety would improve. Compares students' before and after papers utilizing their holistic scores on written expression. Demonstrates that student writing anxiety can be lowered…

Discusses six books intended to support educators who are looking for ways to make poetry a part of children's lives. Examines four books which offer numerous successful examples of reading and writing poetry in classrooms, and then looks at two books that offer poets' perspectives on reading, writing, and teaching poetry. (SR)

Argues that college writing courses are a convenient point for mediation and intervention to train students to be better able to participate in common space (classroom, work environment, governmental process) at effective levels of tolerance by extending their knowledge of others, being clear and articulate about their points of view, and…

Provides activities adaptable for a range of learning contexts. The activities focus on Gardner's multiple intelligences, first aid, conversational language skills, mastering ordinal numbers, and detail in writing. (Author/VWL)

Describes how the writing process is the foundation for writing instruction in a seventh-grade class with full special education inclusion. Describes how daily writing, lots of choice, modeling, and examples of rich writing help all students move ahead to become better writers. (SR)

Argues that writing teachers should seize the initiative and design pedagogically appropriate issues for word-processing technology. Proposes a strategy for designing and employing usage checkers to improve sentence-level fluency. Discusses research on usage checkers, sentence-level revision, and instructor intervention. Offers suggestions on…