The use of the summary in academic reading as an important study skill was studied with a group of 20 master's students in educational psychology. The hypothesis was that preparing a summary of a specialized text would reflect a student's ability to work with such texts in real life. (10 references) (LB)

Provide guidelines, based on research, for the effective preparation, display, and communication of the corporate press release. Outlines physical and written characteristics of effective press releases. (SR)

A British study asked 475 children aged 7-11 to write a piece explaining what good writing is. Children appeared extremely concerned with technical skills more than composition. Developmental stage differences may explain that their concerns reflect what bothered them most at the time and they did not mention what was less bothersome or what they…

Suggests that more needs to be said about unintentional plagiarism because it is more common than teachers realize and because the causes are more complicated than generally acknowledged. Discusses many of the skills necessary to writing a research paper. Suggests reasons for the difficulties students find with these skills. (RS)

Describes a 14-hour course designed to teach grammar to adults in the business world. Describes the kinds of students in the course and why they have not learned grammar previously. Presents 10 suggestions on how a similar course might be taught. (RS)

Presents suggestions for teaching students about poetry by using pets. The article recommends discussing poems about pets, writing with rhyme to describe pets, writing free-verse sketches about pets, collaboratively describing pets, and studying line breaks by writing one-line descriptions of imaginary pets. A reproducible teacher page offers two…

Examines whether accelerated college writing courses are an effective alternative to regular courses in developing writing skills. Finds that accelerated courses were less effective than the regular courses with respect to writing attitudes and percentages of student essays judged competent. (PRA)

This article reports on the process of developing a proficiency-oriented writing contest, as well as a system of assessment of that writing based on a set of rubrics for each level of writing. (Contains six references.) (VWL)

Claims that recent reassessments of Mina Shaughnessy's "Errors and Expectations" and the field of composition in the 1970s overlook the institutional forces that helped shape the rhetoric and methodology of researchers at that time. (HB)

Sixty-two quantitative, lexical, and syntactic features in a corpus of 160 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) texts were identified and counted, producing 28 text variables that were compared with ESL proficiency levels of the writers. Results suggest pedagogical implications for ESL composition instructors. (Contains 12 references.) (LB)

Describes the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, a part of the National Writing Project. Argues that more two-year college English teachers should join the National Writing Project network. (HB)

Discusses ways in which the process of composing may be integrated into the curriculum as part of the learning process. Group writing assignments, peer editing, and the multiple revisions allowed in process writing serve to demystify the task of writing in a foreign language and provide students with opportunities to learn from each other. (eight…

A Macintosh-based project that uses HyperCard to create computer-assisted lessons for composition classes is described. Ways that students have improved their writing skills are discussed, along with ways that the software has changed teaching techniques. (LB)

Discusses writing as a social activity and how collaborative writing enables risk taking and promotes a change in writing attitudes. Provides examples of collaborative writing in the following areas of expository text structure: enumeration, sequence, comparison/contrast, and cause/effect. (MG)

Examines the affective characteristics of basic writers and questions the hypothesis that they suffer from high writing apprehension and low self-esteem. Offers evidence of a group of basic writers in a larger group who had both low writing apprehension and high self-esteem. (MG)