Argues that college English departments need to emphasize the teaching of technical writing and communication if they are to survive the educational changes of the 1960s and 1970s. (RB)

Picture books provide effective models for student writing. For purposes of organization and writing lessons, the models found in picture books may be divided into three groups: (1) language patterns; (2) story structures; and (3) literary elements. Language patterns include repetitive sentence patterns, verse forms, word patterns, and cultural…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the influences of two individual variables--verbal aptitude and writing apprehension--on the production of persuasive arguments by college students. Subjects were 47 college students who wrote preliminary and final drafts of persuasive letters. Results of both experiments revealed that the students' verbal…

Punctuation and capitalization are basic, surface features of written communication. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that authorities recognized that punctuation marks should be primarily an integral part of the sentence pattern, not an indicator of pauses. Throughout the literature on punctuation two major purposes recur--to…

Almost every discussion of technical or scientific writing style mentions the passive voice as a stylistic choice to avoid. However, the passive voice does have legitimate uses in technical and scientific writing--the problem is to define the appropriate or effective uses and the inappropriate or ineffective ones. An examination of passive voice…

The perceived problems of college students' writing and possible ways to improve college writing instruction are the topics of these radio transcripts. In the first script, parents, teachers, and students comment on the state of writing in college. Professionals are interviewed who comment on the difference between oral and written English, the…

A psychological model can show the technical writer how to present information for effective communication by explaining how readers perceive, understand, learn, and remember. The principles underlying the model are the reader's psychological set, the mind's pattern-forming tendencies, the span of short-term memory, and the mind's need for…

Research that purports to judge communicative sophistication on the basis of the revising behaviors of students must control for at least three variables: the subjective difficulty of the task; the student's ability to generate alternate wordings, spellings, and the like; and the student's preferred strategies of composing. Revising is not a…

There is often little correlation between objective tests of writing or writing components and grading by teachers. The technology that can be applied to student writing evaluation lags behind a reasoned rhetorical explanation of test results. Evaluations of writing are inadequate unless they are interpreted within a rhetorical context that…

Students in four freshman composition classes participated in a study to discover if computer assisted instruction (CAI) could be designed, developed, and programed that would effectively stimulate students' inventive processes. A computer was programed with questions drawn from Aristotles' enthymeme topics. Students in the experimental sections…

This manual was developed as a resource for teacher inservice workshops on writing and also for use by individual teachers in developing their own writing skills. Areas of instruction include: development of various manuscript elements (title, table of contents, etc.); generation of unique ideas; typing and illustration; and ways to publish the…

This report discusses a plan to help Georgia school systems develop their own evaluation instruments for student writing. The report indicates that the use of actual writing samples in assessing writing skills can be valid, reliable, and economical. It includes attachments with sample writing scores from a school, the purposes and statistics that…

THIS PROJECT WAS DESIGNED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTIVENESS AND FEASIBILITY OF USING PROGRAMED INSTRUCTION TO CORRECT GRAMMATICAL AND MECHANICAL WRITING ERRORS OF STUDENTS ENROLLED IN A FRESHMAN COMPOSITION COURSE. THE TEST GROUP INCLUDED STUDENTS WHO HAD SCORED LESS THAN 64 IN THE COOPERATIVE ENGLISH TEST. EIGHTEEN PROGRAMS WERE EVALUATED BY THE…

AN EXPERIMENTAL PILOT PROJECT WAS ESTABLISHED DURING THE 1962-63 SCHOOL YEAR IN VARIOUS ISRAELI SECONDARY SCHOOLS TO EXAMINE PROBLEMS IN TEACHING WRITTEN COMPOSITION. THE PROJECT USED EXPERIMENTAL AND CONTROL GROUPS COMPARING TWO SYSTEMS OF INSTRUCTION--(1) THE ASSIGNMENT AND CORRECTION OF COMPOSITIONS, AND (2) A STRUCTURED SYSTEM OF…