Much of the work being done in composition concerns language--an increased awareness and desire to know what it is, how it works, and how people use it to create themselves and their world. The need to review and to teach the basics is obvious, but to present grammar, punctuation, and diction--the building blocks of language that must be…

With particular focus on the need to provide a practical, systematic introduction to the concept of sentence combining and to the signals used to control the various combining operations, this paper provides detailed specifications for including sentence combining as part of a comprehensive plan for teaching the composing process. The…

The home mission of the University English department is the teaching of reading and writing, and its foreign mission is the "converting" to a higher literacy of those outside the English department, especially those who teach English in the high schools and other subjects at the college level. Potential high school English teachers'…

It is the creative writing instructor's role to help the student turn "twitch" poems into "click" poems ("twitch" being a kind of verbal hypertension that takes shape in the absence of anything humanly important to say on the poet's part and "click" being the finished poem that makes a sound like the click of the lid on a perfectly made box).…

Because of dramatic changes in the technology of communication systems in business, industry, government, and the professions, college graduates are no longer writing the way they were taught to write. Instead of being physically engaged in a recursive pen-in-hand process, they are dictating their communications for word processing systems. A…

The first identity new graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) must adopt is the "instructor" persona, which must be carried out with confidence and competence if their freshmen students are to accept them as qualified instructors. For those GTAs who are uncomfortable with this persona, the faculty supervisor can provide them with a detailed teaching…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

Little attention has been paid in composition journals and professional conferences to the practical problems associated with a writing program director's efforts to introduce an innovative composition curriculum within a traditional English department. A collaborative, problem solving approach to curriculum change is a practical way to proceed…

Suspecting that computer assisted instruction (CAI) could help teach grammar to freshman composition students at Northeast Missouri State University (NMSU), three instructors received a research grant to begin a program of testing basic writing skills and to initiate CAI instruction for those students who needed help in the tested areas. A survey…

This guide takes an eclectic approach to literacy training, that is, it allows the instructor to select those materials and methods that best fit the needs of individual learners. It includes a definition of the target population which will include adults who are nonliterate, preliterate, semiliterate, and those who are literate in a non-Roman…

To determine staging points reached in written narratives based on the personal experience of four secondary school students, researchers examined (1) the kinds of ordering or reordering that occur as the writer imaginatively recovers the events of the past; (2) whether the writer automatically assumes or takes for granted that a reader is already…

A study was conducted to determine whether the use of voice as defined by writing theorists is essential to producing good student writing and whether peer interaction would help students gain a greater sense of voice in their writing. Forty-two high school juniors were divided into two clusters: a peer interaction group and a teacher-centered…

A study was conducted to determine if the one-to-one method of teaching writing devised by R. Garrison was superior to more traditional approaches. Subjects were college students in four sections of freshman composition, two using the Garrison method and two using traditional methods of writing instruction. Analysis of data revealed that students…

Included in these proceedings are 11 essays by 12 specialists in the field of writing center administration. The first essay is the keynote address; the other essays are printed in the order in which they were presented at the conference. The papers discuss the following: (1) the writing center: a vision revisited; (2) from thought to word:…

The element of static abstractions (SAs)--any pseudoheuristic listing of derived nominals whose purpose is to define good structure in prose writing--is one of the important historical components of the current traditional rhetoric inherited from the nineteenth century. SAs, of which unity, coherence, and emphasis are the best known examples, have…