Recommends a series of sense exploration exercises to help students develop more adequate descriptive writing. (TJ)

Describes five writing activities for college writing courses: (1) a documented opinion paper exercise; (2) breaking writing rules; (3) trip reports from absentees; (4) case studies to promote writing for particular audiences for pragmatic purposes; and (5) an organizing strategy for studying, using a chart format. (SR)

Describes five activities for college writing courses: (1) sports as a literary topic; (2) paragraph descriptions of a favorite meal; (3) interdisciplinary team teaching in the humanities; (4) use of "real" letters and memoranda in a technical writing course; and (5) a word-strength chart for a poetry-writing class. (MM)

Presents two assignments that are designed to help students (at the high school and college levels) to develop a sense of place while building skills to improve their narrative writing. Includes the assignment sheet. Describes how students create a Michigan Travel Guide from their final drafts. (SR)

Describes a class writing exercise for high school and college English classes (which functions well early in the first semester), which emphasizes a basic idea (that close inspection of a subject will reveal that there is a lot to say about it) by having students describe in detail a person's face, first as a class and then individually. (SR)

Over the last 3 decades or so, English and its related disciplines of Rhetoric and Composition have adopted new tools of research--tools other than the traditional ones of narrative and description. These other tools are empirical or scientific, those that are common to the social sciences, including experiments, case studies, surveys, and…

This book focuses on the integration of an individual's inner and outer landscape. It contains a series of invitations for young people to look out upon their own landscapes and to write the important themes of their lives. The writing experiences outlined in the book give children (and adults) space to become quiet and focused and to tap into…

Noting that computer instruction for teaching composition is generally limited to the component skills of spelling, punctuation, and grammar, this paper proposes a program that can help elementary school students use computers to generate ideas for descriptive writing. The first section of the paper provides orientation procedures designed to…

A study examined two questions: Do students include more information or present it more concisely and explicitly when speaking or writing? and, Does language show different thematic relationships (through syntax or diction) depending upon the mode? Twenty-four community college students viewed one of two brief films and responded orally or in…

Basic writers can be taught to write effective expository prose if they are taught to revise, and they can make considerable progress if they are given opportunities to write narration before tackling the complexities of exposition. Narratives come easily to basic writers and allow them complete control over subject matter and language. The…

Reading students whose reading skills are being improved need to learn expository writing in order to be able to organize and express thoughts on paper. This document presents a systematic approach for teaching writing as part of the total communication process and consists of five units. "The Expository Paragraph," designed for use in a skills…

Assigning students to write resource papers about the library provides the instructor with the opportunity to teach about basic rhetorical methods and gives students the chance to become acquainted with resources they should know. Four different types of papers which give students a variety of writing experiences are a description of two reference…

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which practice in the use of figurative comparisons in the composing of poetry, in both oral and in written form, will increase the use of figurative comparisons in the writing of prose. The study tested oral composition of poetry vs. written composition of poetry, and intensive treatment in…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the writing of elementary children, grades four through six, to determine the relationship between specified genre and the development and use of figurative language. Three teachers, one each in grades four, five, and six in the Metropolitan School District of Perry Township, Indiana, collected…