Students who are not writing, or not writing well, may have a second chance to do so if they are able to receive the counsel of published writers to write before writing. These students should be told of the importance of prewriting. Most writers need time to wait for ideas to formulate. In this preparatory stage, writers feel four pressures that…

Forty-three students in a developmental English course participated in a study to discover whether students' writing would improve and their satisfaction with the course would be increased if they were permitted to revise their papers after the papers were marked but before they were graded rather than after the papers were both marked and graded,…

This paper describes information provided to graduate students who wish to write for professional journals. The information is based on responses to questionnaires, mailed to deans of colleges of education in universities in each of the 50 states, which asked how colleges of education help graduate students wishing to write for professional…

As a solution to the problems presented by approaches to teaching English composition that are almost purely cognitive in nature, an experimental course was offered for freshmen at the Miami-Dade Community College. The course was designed to be holistic and confluent, synthesizing both the cognitive and affective domains by incorporating Gestalt…

These learning objectives have been formulated for use in classes that emphasize individualization as well as in learning centers and resource laboratories that concentrate on a diagnostic and remedial approach to basic skills. They are designed for the mature student who has not yet mastered objectives ordinarily covered in earlier years.…

This document describes teacher requirements in three different instructional systems and the implications of the requirements for teacher training. Short descriptions of the composition skills, spelling, and drama systems produced by the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) are given. Materials and procedures are briefly described for each…

This special issue of "Kansas English" focuses on composition, culture, and citizenship. Included in this issue are the following articles: "Composing: When Artifice Is a Real Help" by Tom Hemmens and Micheal Roberts, which discusses the composing process and suggests various artifices, such as structure charts and sketch outlines, as a means of…

This book deals with short-story writing only and concentrates on the science fiction short story. The book is written by the editor of "Analog Science Fiction Magazine" and is intended for those people who are interested in writing science fiction. The 14 chapters discuss such topics as the theory of chapter, practicing chapter writing, the…

Children's dependence upon the teacher in all aspects of the writing process in the elementary classroom must be replaced by the development of self-critical tools in the young writer. To help this development, the teacher should look at the nature of the writing process, with its three steps of precomposing, composing, and postcomposing, and then…

Composition assignments for elementary and secondary school students should be varied according to the size and scope of the assignment, the size of the composition group, and the degree of help and encouragement required by each student. Writing should not be regarded as punishment, but rather should be designed to provide an optimum level of…

Selecting criteria for usage is done in basically the same way for both technical writing and other forms of composition. Similarly, the same rhetorical theory applies to the teaching of both, and proves especially helpful in the teaching of formal report-writing skills in required freshman composition courses. Focusing on the appropriate voice,…

The 57 items listed in this selected, annotated bibliography either report research which can contribute to knowledge about composition and the teaching of composition, or record classroom experiences or noteworthy ideas about the teaching of composition. (Material dealing with the preparation or inservice training of teachers and with the state…

The author argues that four activities basic to the writing process are ideation, immersion, incubation, and interaction. Ideation is defined as the process of thinking about what is to be written. Immersion is the process of building a file of materials or thoughts on a particular subject. Incubation is allowing the subconscious to supply ideas…

Getting students involved in the process of heightening, which is really the transforming of experience and self-expression into fiction, is a basic factor in teaching the writing of fiction. This process of heightening involves two devices for communicating "felt life": concretization and dramatization. In teaching these devices, prewrigting…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a study of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric of the sentence in enhancing the syntactic fluency of seventh graders as measured by Kellogg Hunt's normative data, and it identified demographic and syntactic features which affect student writing performance. The study involved 149 students and three…