Tutors are true professionals who understand that even though their own philosophical stance toward teaching may differ from an instructor's, they have an obligation to do whatever the professor requires. However, because they work more closely with them, the tutors are in a better position than the teacher to see when the students are having…

SEEN (Seeing Eye Elephant Network) is a computer program intended to help students write better essays by providing a heuristic for invention and a means for audience feedback. In the solo mode, the program prompts students to perceive what they have seen--that is, to consider the literary work in an active way. The program also remembers--like an…

A theory of style called the doctrine of synonymity argues that the separation of form from content allows the possibility of alternative phrasing. This theory led to the conception that during the writing process, writers consider different ways of phrasing and settle on the formulation that best expresses the meaning intended. However, the…

The purpose of this study was to assess the long-term effects of a corporate training program in business and technical writing. Subjects were 135 employees who attended ten three-day workshops during the course of one year. The effects of the workshops were assessed in two stages: immediately after the training through an evaluation form and one…

A study to determine the effect of audience on student writers' revision strategies involved 13 college students, seven reasonably competent upper-level writers and six basic writers, who were assigned to write for an hour on a uniform essay topic, composing aloud into a tape recorder as they did so. Six of the upper level students and five of the…

Teacher-student writing conferences should provide students in composition classes with concentrated attention to their writing consonant with the teacher's in-class persona and instructional objectives. Some alternatives available to the instructor and the conferee include watching the teacher compose, sharing and revising journal entries,…

Diagramming composition as a control structure allows us to see the interaction between process and product and to discover that composition is not a linear process but starts and stops, returns and fixes, and moves ahead. In the interaction of three factors--the real world, the writer, and the reader--a text is produced. The objects, social…

Error analysis can provide teachers with a foundation for creating practical writing experiences for students and can allow the teacher to examine errors for linguistic features appropriate and inappropriate to the social context of writing. Teachers tend to call for a finished, error-free product, a polished final paper instead of using error…

Strategies used in the writing process by fourth grade students were studied by eliciting miscues in sentence combining writing samples. Following the procedure used by Goodman in the elicitation of miscues in reading, students were required to perform writing exercises slightly above their expected ability. Writing samples were collected from 9…

This document traces the history of sentence combining, from Ney's study in 1966 and Mellon's study in 1969 to recent research conducted by Ney and supported by the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. Studies by O'Hare (1973), Ney (1975), Combs (1975), Perron (1974), Green (1972), Hunt and O'Donnell (1969), Miller…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

Students beginning a freshman composition class tend to regard writing as an editing process rather than as a process which encompasses intelligence, character, and humanity. Helping students understand and master heuristic procedures on the way to developing composition skills can be facilitated by the use of the game Twenty Questions to learn…

A competency test for writing that tests writing competency as an interdisciplinary skill called "academic writing" has been developed at The American University. The test focuses heavily on the subject and lightly on the writer or on the writer's sensibility. It avoids asking the student to write introspective "meditations," to take and defend a…

Although modern discourse theory asserts that purpose is most fundamental to writing, it is genuine intention that students' writing most often lacks. Assigned topics compel students to write when the occasion is not genuine and there is no real opportunity to communicate. Research indicates that the two principal modes of writing are extensive,…

Noting that one of the biggest factors in motivating students in technical writing classes is to convince them that they will need to write in their future jobs, this paper offers evidence for use by teachers in persuading students of the importance of developing their writing skills. The first part of the paper presents refutations of some of the…