This paper contains handouts and materials for use in a college level nonfiction television writing course. Following a description of the course and its assignments and texts, the major portion of the paper contains samples of various script formats, including a news commentary, a commercial advertisement, a documentary, and public and community…

One approach to introducing students to poetry is to have them write and analyze their own poems. Although this approach has some disadvantages, it does serve to tap students' experiences and expressive potential with creative projects and to give them an immediate and direct relationship with the traditional published works. By writing poems…

There are two crucial limitations in preparing graduate teaching assistants (TAs) for the composition classroom: the background they bring to teaching and the limited time available for training. Most TAs, although knowledgeable in literature, lack authority on the subject of composition instruction. An ideal TA would (1) have a masters degree;…

Dreams can be used to draw students into an authentic expression of their creativity and to give them some validation for what they are as persons. A "dream seminar" in a writing course could have students read and discuss Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; log, report, and discuss their dreams during the course; and explore other…

The assumptions underpinning grammatical mistakes can often be detected by looking for patterns of errors in a student's work. Assumptions that negatively influence rhetorical effectiveness can similarly be detected through error analysis. On a smaller scale, error analysis can also reveal assumptions affecting rhetorical choice. Snags in the…

Objects assembled in nonrepresentational fashion from tinker toy pieces are the starting point for a technical description writing assignment designed to increase the students' awareness of audience while at the same time giving them practice in description, analysis, and active judgment. Having been separated into two groups, each facing a…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

A study was conducted to ascertain if the teaching of sentence building by means of specific sentence patterns would result in an increased use of these sentence patterns in the written compositions of second grade children. Writing samples were obtained from a group of second grade children both before and after the treatment and were analyzed…

A study was undertaken to observe the prewriting processes of four high and four low writing apprehensive college students and to explore any composing patterns that seemed characteristic of the two groups. During the study, each of the eight participants attended at least four 90-minute sessions that were designed to document the complex…

To compare the relative reliable uses and cost effectiveness of the analytic, the holistic, and the primary trait scoring methods, an inquiry was conducted in which a group of raters scored a large number of secondary school students' essays according to each of the scoring methods. Raters were nine graduate students in English who were trained in…

The latest perceptions of writer-audience relationships have not been applied to what teachers actually do in the classroom. When the idea of audience is applied at all, it is often misapplied, resulting in classroom activities that fail to facilitate learning and many, in some cases, that force students to perform tasks so unreal that credibility…

This guide provides specific activities designed for use with the Clifford-the-Dog books to enhance students' personal development and enjoyment of literature. The general format for each activity includes the title of the Clifford book to be used, synopsis of the story, introduction to the book, and follow-up project. Activities are provided for…

Sentence combining is one kind of practice activity, quite specific in character, aimed at teaching syntactic fluency and judgment and the use of the devices of cohesion. Students can be led through the revision process step by step by converting the odd essay from real writing to a practice exercise, then actually providing the content needed for…

This text is a verbatim transcription of an interview with John Bates, a former math coordinator for Metro-Toronto schools, and the Director of Inner City Education, Toronto, Canada. (The interview was conducted by Thomas C. O'Brien under the auspices of the Teachers' Center Project of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.) Much of the…

The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write. Success in the conference can be connected both to its structure (who can talk when and how much, and what types of talk are sequenced in what ways) and to the content within that structure (what topics are discussed, the amount of collaboration…