AN INSTRUCTIONAL GUIDE WHICH DEVELOPS THE SKILL NEEDED TO ACQUIRE IDEAS AND TO COMMUNICATE THEM CLEARLY AND EFFECTIVELY IN ACCEPTABLE WRITTEN ENGLISH IS PRESENTED. AN OUTLINE OF THE COURSE INCLUDES WRITING LESSONS IN DESCRIPTION, REPORTING, EXTENDED DEFINITON, CLASSIFICATION AND DIVISION, COMPARISON AND CONTRAST, INTERPRETING EXPERIENCE OR THE…

THE PROCESS OF PERCEIVING LANGUAGE SYMBOLS AS CUES FOR MEANING, MODELS FOR SKILL PERFORMANCE, AND DEFINITIONS OF VALUE PERCEPTION WAS INVESTIGATED. THE OBJECTIVES WERE (1) TO COMPARE THE PERFORMANCE ON SELECTED PERCEPTUAL TASKS OF SAMPLING POPULATIONS OF MENTALLY RETARDED, AVERAGE, AND SUPERIOR CHILDREN, AND (2) TO ANALYZE THESE FINDINGS IN…

A proficient item writer should possess several attributes: knowledge and understanding of the material being tested, continuous awareness of objectives, continous awareness of the instructional model, understanding of the students for whom the items are intended, skill in written communication, and skill in the techniques of item writing. The…

A special assessment of writing skills was conducted during the 1979-80 school year for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) by the Education Commission of the States. The purposes of the study were to examine the writing abilities of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds enrolled in the DoDDS System, and to compare their writing abilities…

This paper describes the writing skills section of a language skills framework that was devised as part of a project to indicate language competencies necessary for functioning in English classrooms in grades one through six. The paper discusses the collection and grade leveling of the writing skills and describes the organization of those skills…

Part of the reward for expository college English papers is, of course, letter grades, but careful writing offers two greater rewards: knowledge and liberation. Teachers can best motivate students to write by seeing to it that the writing they assign teaches and challenges, and by assigning topics that are important to students but ones that they…

Journal writing--an expressive prose that verbalizes the writer's consciousness--helps the student by fostering personal growth, reducing writing apprehension, strengthening prewriting in students' composing processes, and enhancing the development of writing abilities. Journals are places for students to write what they will, for teachers to…

This paper contains descriptions of documents setting forth the minimum communications skills competencies required for high school graduation in seven states: Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Utah. It then describes the procedures used to compile a synthesized list from those documents for use in a project to assess…

A teaching strategy has been developed for showing business and technical writing students how to write abstracts. The strategy contains six steps: (1) explain the importance of abstracts; (2) define summary and descriptive abstracts; (3) give students general guidelines for preparing abstracts; (4) explain topic and sentence outlines, showing the…

To determine if people who wrote legal documents could read such documents with understanding and rewrite them to be understandable to the general public, eight experienced government writers were asked to rewrite a portion of a government regulation for a general audience. The writers--four lawyers and four nonlawyers--were audio recorded as they…

This journal issue provides topics and methods that elementary school teachers can use in writing instruction. The first part of the bulletin describes the nature of the composing process, the types of writing that elementary students produce, and an analysis of teaching strategies. These comments speak to the classroom teacher and reflect recent…

Peer writing groups help students to write personally satisfying, communicative prose by allowing them to get away from competition for grades and from the fear and authority carried by the teacher. The writing group approach builds into the writing process the opportunity for revision and feedback before submitting a paper to the teacher for a…

Speeches and compositions often become mere word lists, obscuring the message's true meaning with too many words. This paper shows that the words "use,""of," and "it" can be eliminated from writing and speech, making communications shorter, more understandable, and more efficient. Examples are provided. (RL)

This paper suggests that it is possible to construct a course that integrates the teaching of composition with the teaching of literature without allowing the secondary goal of heightened literary understanding to overwhelm the primary goal of improved expository writing. It presents a syllabus for a four-week unit on Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun…

While freewriting is valuable for the beginning or basic writer, it embodies certain difficulties. Sufficient time and preparation are necessary to move from freewriting to the structured composition frequently required on course exit examinations. The student instructed by means of freewriting may later resent having to rewrite or edit. Some…