In today's educational climate, it is more important than ever that teachers prepare their students to be effective and competent writers who can write for a variety of purposes. How can teachers teach their students the skills they need to be successful while also fostering an appreciation for the process, craft, and art of writing? Drawing from…

This grammar handbook emphasizes formal written usage, offering clues to help with comprehension. The seven sections discuss: (1) "Nouns" (e.g., most nouns can follow "the," and possessives can show more than possession); (2) "Pronouns" (e.g., pronouns come in small groups, and some pronouns defy logic); (3) "Verbs" (e.g., some plural subjects…

This study examined strategy use in producing lexical collocations among freshman English majors at the Chinese Culture University. Divided into two groups by English writing proficiency, students completed three tasks: a collocation test, an optimal revision task, and a task-based structured questionnaire regarding their actions and mental…

Technical education students need to realize high expectations and goals in writing. They have a plethora of purposes to be good communicators in written endeavors. This paper first outlines the reasons why they need to be careful with written communications, and then lists some of the purposes for which their communications are written. The paper…

This publication is devoted to concerns surrounding the teaching and learning of writing, and offers resources and ideas for professionals, including articles, interviews with prominent members of the field, book reviews, and brief updates on research by the National Center for the Study of Writing and National Writing Project activities. Articles…

This study asked four experienced teachers to respond to elementary students' science writing and explain their thinking, discussing factors they considered as they made the choices that ultimately supported or undermined children's attempts to write about science. Teachers responded first in writing, then orally expanded on written comments…

Providing grades 4-6 students with practice and reinforcement in editing for capitalization, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, usage, and content, this computer software program contains over 30 written accounts that have been sequenced from easier to more difficult. The program has 3 levels of play: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. At each…

Based on the premise that writing for video is not like writing for text, this guide tells the writer how to create a video script that turns particular ideas into powerful and effective video. Defining a video script as a "blueprint for a video," the guide takes the writer step-by-step through the entire process of creating a video.…

Noting that good writing is good business, this book offers 35 practical techniques that foster simplicity, conciseness, and emphasis. The book discusses how to: (1) write with verbs instead of nouns; (2) decide when to use active versus passive constructions; (3) recognize wordy phrases and redundant expressions; (4) distinguish the uses of…

Most teachers would agree that children should undertake a wide range of types of non-fiction writing, but there are many questions about how this aim should be achieved and about how teachers can help children learn about the various structural demands of particular writing forms. "Writing frames" are one strategy which can help…

This Student Activity Book is designed to be used with the "Guidebook for Parents and Teachers" of the same series. The Level 3 activity book consists of worksheets intended to help children discover and practice the most important patterns and principles that govern English spelling and writing. It includes short and long vowels, punctuation,…

The intent of the Washington State Writing Framework is to provide support for the development of writing benchmarks and instructional guidelines for individual school districts. The purpose of the writing framework is: to provide grade by grade overview of the Essential Academic Learning Requirements in writing; to complement the frameworks for…

Two areas of study in the composition field, grammar and style, have fallen below the critical and professional radar, left to the handbook writers, old-school theorists, and secondary educators. Though a few voices remain, their conspicuous absence in the scholarly journals and at professional conferences clearly suggests that the field has moved…

By making simple bookmarks, students in grades 6-8 practice summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews in these two 50-minute class sessions--all while writing for an authentic audience. Student objectives for this lesson are that they will: write summaries and reviews for books they read; identify appropriate symbols that relate to…