Based on courses showing teachers how to use many kinds of objects to teach writing and stimulated by ideas from teachers across the country, this booklet contains suggestions for helping students improve their writing. The booklet discusses writing about objects as a process involving the following steps: making observations and gathering data,…

In a study exploring how writers use audience awareness and how that awareness is related to the writer's age, four eighteen-year-old and four nine-year-old writers were assigned letters to write for two different audiences: a friend and a great aunt whom they had never met. Thinking-aloud writing protocols were produced at the time of writing. At…

The current focus on high level planning and abstract goals runs the risk of misrepresenting the contributions that cognitive psychology could make to the study of writing if it neglects important linguistic features that distinguish the writing of natural language from other problem solving tasks. An alternative perspective on writing emphasizes…

The author presents a systematic format for reducing variations between numerous performance objectives to their component parts, with the view that the teacher, student, and/or administrator will be better able to understand all the possible combinations that develop in objective writing as each teacher teaches in a personal way. Writing course…

This history takes a decade-by-decade look at literacy education in the United States in the twentieth century. For each decade, the prevailing social climate, available statistics, legislation, programs, professional activities, methods, and materials related to adult basic education are considered. Concern for adult literacy programs was very…

The material reviewed in the 37 articles and papers listed here suggests that responsibility for establishing and maintaining standards for writing among college students is a college-wide burden. The articles are of two kinds: some deal directly with the questions of interdepartmental responsibility for teaching writing; others touch on the…

This paper discusses the use of simple sentence-combining exercises as a way to show students the unlimited capacity of their own language. Using sets consisting of eight, six, four, and three sentences, no two students of the 27 in a freshman composition class produced identical rewrites of any one set. Such exercises are useful for instilling a…

This discussion gives a rationale for providing options for extrapolation within the context of composition topics. Whether topics are specified by someone other than the writer or are self-chosen, they "fructify" according to the composer's sense of purpose and audience. Developing such a sense has not been a prominent part of the typical school…

This paper suggests that oral reading of written composition can be an effective method of sensitizing students to the presence of grammatical and logical errors. A sample paragraph is used to illustrate the technique; guidelines for use include the suggestions that students be asked to look for one particular type of compositional error (such as…

Paper presented at Annual Convention of National Council of Teachers of English (Milwaukee, Wis., November 28-30, 1968).

Summary of author's doctoral dissertation, "Syntactic and Semantic Elements of Students' Oral and Written Discourse: Implications for Teaching Composition, Stanford Univ., 1967.