Efforts to improve the quality of business communication often include developing tailor-made short courses that are offered "in-house" to corporation management personnel. These following guidelines, based on one corporate writing teacher's experiences, should help others to develop writing courses for businesses: obtain samples of the types of…

In technical writing classes writing can come alive to students, because in such classes students are knowledgeable about their subjects and can simulate writing to real audiences in business and industry rather than only to teachers. Students practice writing within determined and specified formats and to a standard style in response to…

Students in college composition courses often have great difficulty learning to write research papers. They can learn to write better research papers through a series of steps: learning to read for the main point, writing opinion papers on topics that are personally meaningful to them, preparing lists of questions implicit in the opinion papers in…

After a long process of trial and error, a freshman composition course was developed on the basis of three assumptions. First, freshman English should be a course in expository writing rather than a literature course, since a great deal of time is required for students to master the complicated skills involved in effective exposition. Second,…

This guidebook provides the classroom teacher with ideas and resources for teaching creative writing at the secondary level. For each type of writing that is discussed, instructional objectives, notes for teachers' presentations of new concepts, classroom activities, discussion questions, small-group activities, projects, individual assignments,…

A large body of research has been interpreted as showing that formal grammar instruction does not lead to better student writing. This literature review questions the conclusiveness of the evidence that is usually cited. The term "formal grammar instruction" has been one source of problems; most studies have failed to distinguish between a body of…

Teachers of writing can be compared to tourists in that they often deal only with the superficial aspects of student writing. Some teachers approach written themes carrying correction symbols as gadgets; others dissect student writing through the use of computer terminals and t-units. Still others view the writer romantically as someone with…

The middle school curriculum outlined in this guide places writing at the hub of the language arts program, with the other areas of English instruction arranged around it so that no area is studied in isolation. Literary genres, for example, are viewed as the written record of peoples' thoughts, and vocabulary study includes maintaining a…

This document describes the development of the language skills subprogram of the Hawaii English Program--Secondary. After considering various theories of instructional strategies in language, the team developed a pair of complementary subprograms: a part-to-whole skills lab for building up students' stocks of language options and a whole-to-part…

The purpose of a semester course for journalism and creative writing students at Washington University was to help students, through reading and writing portraits in "new journalese," become capable critics of new journalistic writing. Students first were introduced to the techniques of new journalism in Tom Wolfe's book on new journalism and in…

Discusses good translation techniques, "true bilingualism," and the effect of bilingualism on cognitive development. (Text is in French.) Available from Lloyds Bank Chambers, 91 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BN, England. (AM)

A report on a two-year teaching experience at the University of Paris' Department of Expression and Communication Sciences and Techniques (DESTEC), a multidisciplinary center for the study of language in its communicative function. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Discusses the methodology of writing a text which will transmit the essential information of a source text, including correct and incorrect procedure. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Presents guidelines for teaching high school and college students how to write essay tests in English. (RB)