This report of the writing project at P.K. Yonge Laboratory School, University of Florida, examines the effectiveness of a systematic approach to teaching high school composition. The approach, which focuses on the skills that enable students to write clearly, correctly, and purposefully, includes sequential instructional units, considerable…

To assure that students graduating from the institutions of higher education in Georgia possess basic academic literacy, an essay test was devised to provide system-wide information on the status of student competence in the areas of reading and writing and to identify those students who do not attain the expected levels of competence. The…

Teachers in all disciplines must demand good writing from students if they want their writing to improve. When good writing is demanded only in English classes, students develop a double standard for their writing. To make teachers in other departments aware of their responsibility for the quality of student writing, English teachers can take the…

A course in communications skills for the biomedical sciences is a component unique to the New Mexico State University MARC Honors Undergraduate Program. The program seeks to identify and assist minority students who show evidence of having clear potential to perform at a high level in the biomedical sciences and who show a determination to enter…

The findings from a study of five students undertaken to determine how unskilled college writers compose, whether their writing processes can be analyzed in a systematic manner, and what an increased understanding of those processes suggests about the nature of composing and about the manner in which writing is taught are presented in this paper.…

Observation and interviews of the children in two third grade classrooms--one in which children write frequently and learn punctuation skills in context, and one in which children learn punctuation in isolation--suggest that punctuation skills are learned more effectively in context. In interviews the "writers" could explain an average of 8.66…

Skilled and unskilled writers were given detailed information about an urban planning project and then read a letter from an influential, interested, and potentially hostile writer requesting information about the project. Each writer was next asked to generate all the ideas needed to answer the letter, organize a framework for the letter from a…

This guide to writing and publishing in vocational education is divided into four sections. The first section outlines guidelines for writing for professional journals. Specific topics included are (1) writing for your audience, (2) introducing the subject, (3) the why of an article, (4) the how of an article, and (5) ten ways to get your article…

A study was conducted to determine what conditions connected with college students' entering status were associated with significantly increased error reduction during the first semester of freshman composition and what factors connected with preparation made it possible to classify students who proved to be successful--or unsuccessful--in that…

M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have provided a system for analyzing the cohesive relations that enable a sequence of T-units to be considered a complete text. (A T-unit consists of a main clause and all its dependent clauses.) These concepts of cohesion proved effective in analyzing the differences between five "high" and five "low" quality essays…

A study was conducted to investigate: (1) what linguistic and mental abilities are involved in composition; (2) to what extent undergraduate students in India possess these abilities, in English and in their native language; and (3) to what extent these abilities are being taught. The major portion of the paper discusses the nature of composition,…

This manual outlines the procedures necessary for successful implementation of the Project READ-WRITE program. Two components are emphasized: the area of administration, supervision, and coordination; and the area of inservice training. Project READ-WRITE is described as a basic skills program in reading and related language arts designed to use…

The case study described in this paper supports the premise that sentence combining exercises do more to improve student writing than simply producing longer sentences. Following a brief description of a longitudinal study that involved college freshmen in 15 weeks of sentence combining exercises, the paper focuses on the changing characteristics…

College basic writing teachers involved in student/teacher conferences should be aware of the negative effects that result from premature reassurance, assuring students of success too quickly and/or beyond reasonable expectations. The attitudes of basic writers can be divided into three general categories: (1) those who have always had trouble in…

A course in technical writing has justification for appearing in a college English department curriculum if course content as it is currently taught is somewhat modified. In general, business or technical writing has been primarily a study of a wide variety of letter and report writing forms. To be taught as a liberal arts course, a technical…