The purpose of this study was to determine whether students enrolled in a developmental English course at a public technical institute would show greater writing improvement and course satisfaction if they revised compositions before rather than after grading. The 21 member control and 22 member experimental groups were composed of students…

Carl Rogers' approach to communication has implications for the rhetorician and the teacher of college composition. The qualities of respect, restraint, neutrality, and understanding, when applied to written and oral discourse, can provide an effective alternative to polemical argumentation. The detatchment and empathy of the Rogerian style is…

Writing style is a personal characteristic that emerges over a period of time as a writer studies his work. Although in this sense style may not be taught, it can be encouraged through the formation of teacher/student relationships and the establishment of successful writing communities. In addition, composition teachers can facilitate the…

This paper initially presents the results of several studies concerning what kind of writing science teachers assign and what kind of writing science textbooks assign. By far, reporting was the most popular type of writing assigned in the surveyed textbooks, although other types of writing were in evidence. Exposition tended to take three forms:…

A method for stimulating and facilitating organizational writing in the secondary school is described in this paper. Pictorial sequences are coordinated and arranged to typify the four major styles of writing: narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive. These sequences both portray a meaningful event in keeping with the writing style and…

The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to teaching a creative writing sequence for high school students. During the first 45-day course, over 30 papers are to be written. Students begin with a paper titled "I Am" and proceed through a series of self-discovery papers. The papers give the students a chance to understand…

The starting point for teaching children to write poetry is allowing them to develop experiences and language to describe them. Another way of teaching or stimulating children to write poetry is to provide them with a rich and varied background of poetry by reading a wide range of poems to them. Poetry should become an integral part of talk and…

This conversation between Louis E. Haga and Harry Berger, Jr., is part of the National Humanities Faculty "Why Series." The discussion in this booklet touches not only on reading and writing, but on some of the cultural and structural consequences of typography and print literacy. Some of the other topics discussed include reading…

The language arts program presented in this guide is a two-year curriculum for the junior high school which may be used in either a teacher-centered or a student-centered approach. The emphasis is on a balance between grammar and writing study and literary study. Contents consist of an outline for a grammar and writing curriculum, an outline for a…

This paper proposes using dramatic situations for prewriting and writing assignments. Dramatic situations are defined as the process by which students, working in pairs, argue or discuss on paper in dialogue form a human question or problem. A sequence of exercises in several stages is outlined. First, students are divided into pairs and pass a…

The problems which freshmen exhibit in using the written language extend beyond difficulties with mechanics to handicaps in using words to formulate and develop concepts. A linguistic approach to teaching freshman composition involves recognizing every linguistic act as creative and a word as having a history as well as a variety of meanings. In…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the currently taught methods of paragraph development are actually used in contemporary expository writing. Composition textbooks published since 1960 were examined to ascertain which methods of development are being taught. To discover the types of paragraph development found in…

Four Project English studies, two in composition and two in reading, reflected the following research findings. The first study in composition found no correlation between knowledge of traditional grammar and performance in composition among college freshmen as measured by the STEP Essay Test and the Iowa Grammar Information Test, although the…

With increased awareness of the reading problems of college students, more attention in recent years has been focused on dyslexia. No reliable figures exist on the occurrence of dyslexia among college students, but 10 percent is a representative estimate among elementary students; hence there would logically be fewer dyslexic college students.…

Freshman composition calls for a teaching technique in which the content of the course is primarily student-created materials. Since by definition a writer is one who writes, a freshman writing course should simulate the professional writing process and also provide an outlet for the product. The steps in the writing process are psychological…