Modeling the process of communication through fictive constructions of audience is as much a part of teaching writing as is imparting rules for grammar and organization. A historical review of rhetorical theory and the goals of writing instruction delineates the shift away from traditional, fuzzy conceptions of audience to more carefully…

A review of the arguments for and against requiring literature courses in the preparation of teachers of English reveals that a thorough knowledge of literature is essential to teach English, and especially composition courses, successfully. Courses in rhetoric, linguistics, and advanced writing are also necessary, but the major emphasis should be…

A journal-based college composition program has been developed that links journal writing to the development of competence in more formal writing. Students write both free choice and assigned entries, and their entries become the basis of all the themes they write; in-class assignments focus on the improvement of specific aspects of the journal…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. Methods are illustrated for teaching students to recognize dishonest language and to write honestly themselves and include cliche/euphemism avoidance techniques,…

To get students started in story writing, teachers can divide them into groups and ask each group to create a story from a plot provided by one student, a character provided by another, and a setting provided by a third. In preparation for this activity, the teacher should instruct students in the development of the story elements of plot,…

A total of 219 instructors of writing at the elementary, secondary, and--primarily--the college levels responded to a questionnaire survey designed to obtain information concerning their professional preparation and research priorities. The findings revealed that a large percentage of instructors did not feel they were well trained for their work.…

Designed for educators actively involved with the teaching of writing, this report contains an overview of the procedures and a detailed presentation of the findings and recommendations of the 1979 Manitoba (Canada) Writing Assessment program. Following an introduction, the five major sections of the report provide the following information: (1)…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

Because the Texas Department of Human Resources (DHR) was demanding writing competency from its employees, and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) had a supply of competent writers in the form of undergraduate and graduate English majors, UTSA established a writing laboratory at the DHR. A three-credit course was developed to briefly…

This compilation of papers addresses the history, present status, and trends of technical and related writing. The first of the eight papers surveys the present environment of the technical report and assesses the effectiveness of the technical report format of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in transmitting information.…

Sentence combining exercises present material to the students to be mastered by processes similar to memorization. By taking ideas in short sentences and compacting them into larger sentences, students become familiar with the relationships between the ideas in the short sentences. At its best, sentence combining is a process that requires the…

Several articles of interest to teachers of English as a second language (ESL) are included. In "Syllabus Design and the Adult Beginner," Keith Johnson discusses the various choices the course organizer must make to make a syllabus communicative. Among the ideas for "Developing Writing Skills" offered by Patricia A. Denham are…

This paper describes writing as an exploration through unknown terrain by which student writers find out what they are really thinking. It offers teachers the following ground rules to help the difficult process whenever their students are writing in any subject: (1) do not ask students to regurgitate what they already know; (2) give students time…

A collaborative project in a college freshman technical writing class produced multiple benefits to those involved. The project, designed to be an experiential and investigatory writing assignment rather than a perfunctory one, challenged students to identify a campus problem regarding enrollment procedures and to work through the problem-solving…

The Story Maker is a teaching device that allows children to create stories by choosing options from a set of already-written story segments. This device (1) provides an active language experience that allows children to construct stories easily; (2) demonstrates the consequences of choosing different ways for a story to proceed; (3) avoids the…