Four issues of the "Macintosh Lab Monitor" document the Computer-Aided Writing Project at the Forman School (Connecticut) which is a college preparatory school for bright dyslexic adolescents. The project uses Macintosh computers to teach outlining, writing, organizational and thinking skills. Sample articles have the following titles:…

Representative titles from the 59 articles published in this yearbook include: "Becoming a Nation of Readers: Reactions from the Media" (L. H. Ringler); "Extracting Important Information from Text" (J. P. Williams); "The Effects of Reading Instruction on the Restructuring Process" (C. J. Gordon and B. J. Rennie); "Prior Knowledge Activation in…

The rapid adoption of computers for story writing by the mass media revolutionized some aspects of the journalistic art. A survey of journalism programs assessed the spread of computer technology from the newsrooms to its college and university journalism classrooms. Of the 271 institutions responding to the survey, 220 had adopted computers and…

This bibliography contains lengthy annotations of 29 sources which address the issues of prewriting; revision; the emotions involved in the writing process; different methods of writing instruction; and the relationships among reading, writing, and reasoning. Also included are a glossary of terms, a summary of the issues raised by the works cited,…

This paper considers the effect of computer use (word processing) on the compositions written by minority college freshmen in basic writing courses, focusing in particular on differences in composition quality and the kinds of thinking evidenced in the essay, as well as determining whether any differences were gender related. Subjects were 40…

A classroom activity to facilitate the process of forming images in the mind (seeing) while writing is described in detail. The activity, called the Where Exercise, consists of the instructor naming a series of locations and the students writing down three objects which they "see" in each of those locations. It is emphasized that the…

To assess the effectiveness of various composition evaluation methods, a study asked two freshman English classes to respond to three questionnaires on the writing of personal essays and methods of evaluation they had experienced. Responses indicated that all students had a fear of having their essays evaluated. Evaluation methods considered a…

Present composition teaching and testing techniques do not formally capture student improvement across essays. Contract learning, a procedure in which student essays are error-analyzed for repeated mistakes, can do so. Correction of those repetitions becomes a set of goals on a written contract signed by the teacher and student, and the student…

Computerized spelling programs or "spelling checkers" can be a wonderful tool for writers at any level of competence. However, they should not be used as adjuncts to the teaching of writing unless they meet two boundary conditions, one of size and one of design. The problem with design of the programs is that they allow for the…

The result of a workshop on the holistic scoring of compositions, this guide is intended to help elementary school teachers evaluate more thoroughly their students' writing. Following an introduction to the handbook's origins, the first section discusses elements of holistic scoring, including procedures for preparation, scoring, and interpreting…

Meaning does not reside in the text or the reader but results from interactions between text, reader, and the interpretive communities that the readers belong to or that influence them. These interpretive communities are those communities or authorities that influence the reader/writer in interpreting texts, with resulting ideational,…

Recognizing that no single evaluation instrument or procedure could provide a genuine measure of teaching effectiveness, the University of Southern Mississippi devised an evaluation system specifically designed for composition that consists of four components: student evaluation, observation of classroom activity, evaluation of a set of marked…

Students of English as a second language (ESL) often come to the classroom with little or no experience in writing in any language and with inaccurate assumptions about writing. Rather than correct these assumptions, teachers often seem to unwittingly reinforce them, actually inducing errors into their students' work. Teacher-induced errors occur…

Suitable for grades K-6, the paper presents guidelines for evaluating various levels of writing ability. Also presented are a description of a four-phase writing process model and a list of components necessary for a good writing program. Characteristics of superior, typical, and weak writing are presented on a continuum according to the student's…

After presenting a series of assumptions about the teaching of playwriting (for example, that students can be taught the craft, if not the art, of playwriting; students must be kept to a strict deadline if they are to develop into disciplined writers; and playwriting should never be discussed outside the context of production possibilities), this…