This monograph provides educators with the fundamental knowledge needed to develop and use direct assessments of student writing proficiency. The first chapter offers a brief review of the current status of writing assessment in the United States, focusing on emerging interest in the topic over the past decade. The second chapter presents an…

The discrepancy in the application of terminology in labeling systems for scoring writing samples is discussed in this paper and current scoring systems that exclude frequency counts of writing features are described. Two-thirds of the paper discusses and gives examples of general impression, marking, analytic scale scoring, and primary trait…

Student writers should be encouraged to move beyond a "jargon" or "public discourse" model of writing. This can be accomplished by capitalizing on the students' knack for imitation by turning it into public parody. After being divided into small panels of three, four, or five members, students are assigned a voice and topic and asked to develop a…

Defining "functional documents" as those such as regulations, contracts, and policies that people must read in order to act, this paper posits the need for a revision principle by which writers can structure such documents to meet readers' needs. The first part of the paper describes a research project that uncovered some needs of…

A study was undertaken to determine if the spelling preferences of chief executives of corporations were reflected in the views of their personnel directors in their consideration of employment applications. Fifty-two high-level executives in business and industry responded to a questionnaire concerning their preferences for standard or reformed…

Teacher/student conferences in composition at their best involve a shared commitment involving both teacher and student in developing meaning in the student's writing and are an improvement over theme annotation, which separates writer and reader and tends to cast the teacher in the role of respondent with judgmental powers. However, unless…

Sentence combining (SC) training has been found to consistently stimulate improvement in the syntactic fluency and overall quality of student writing. However, it remains to be established whether SC training also consistently improves the grammatical fluency, the semantic fluency, the conceptual fluency, and the logical fluency of student…

Text analysis is the study and description of units of verbal behavior larger than the sentence and is concerned with elements of sentences and with the internal relations of larger passages as well as with how a text relates to the communicative situation in which it occurs. It is of current interest because literary critics have moved toward…

Remedial writers tend to be students who have never written very much, who come from families or neighborhoods in which more than one language may be spoken, and who have sensed their problems but have been unable or unwilling to do much to alleviate the difficulties. Unfortunately, the environment and attitudes of many college remedial programs…

This document contains outlines of work sessions on how to write better objectives and a workbook to accompany these sessions. The first section of the document discusses the following seven steps to be observed in writing better behavioral objectives: (1) write a simple behavioral objective; (2) edit your verb to make it an action verb; (3)…

This paper argues that provocative questions can be used by teachers to help students write. Described are a series of questions drawn from rhetorical theory, such as "How many times can I change focus so as to get the most complete understanding of a topic?""When does X occur?""Why does X occur?" and "What does X cause or prompt?" Several…

Three possibilities are discussed for providing communications skills to engineering students. In preference to having the English department teach technical writing to engineers, with either total or partial control of methodology, the authors recommend that engineering educators undertake the task themselves. (MLH)

The rationale and uses of a checklist for evaluating essays from a second semester college composition course are described in this paper. The checklist has 23 yes/no items organized by subject: content, organization, and mechanics. A scoring rubric which assigns 30 points to the content items and 10 to each of the others is used to convert…

The guide provides suggestions for vocational educators who desire to write proposals for research, demonstration, or development. The guide's first chapter, Organizing Your Ideas, outlines procedures for communicating one's intentions and for preparing a prospectus or abstract, and offers models of abstracts. The second chapter, Writing the…

Imitation can be a useful method of teaching students to write well. Imitations may be "loose" or "close." Loose imitation aims for faint resemblance; it requires a perception of a particular model that looks at its most conspicuous features, such as tone, arrangement of ideas, and the general character of the diction. Close imitation aims at…