Superordinates in Halliday and Hasan's analysis of cohesion are lexical items which refer to preceding terms, ideas, or actions, or to whole stretches of discourse, by naming a more inclusive category or class within which the antecedent is included. In written texts the interrelationships between superordinates and more specific terms, or…

In addition to writing short stories, poems, and plays, seniors enrolled in a creative writing course in a New York high school compose and illustrate children's stories. They first become familiar with published works of children's literature so that they can learn to identify and appreciate story devices used by professional writers. As the…

The Methodology Inventory is a 76-item 4-point measure divided into eight scales designed to determine what behaviors a teacher engages in while teaching. The eight scales are stimuli for writing, prewriting, writing, revising/editing, evaluation, language development, varieties of discourse, and publication of written work. The instrument was…

The University of Lowell (Massachusetts) conducted a writing needs assessment in order to help its English department and department of continuing education systematically formulate a professional writing curriculum responsive to documented needs. Questionnaires were mailed to representatives of industries and businesses in Massachusetts and New…

A program for the 1982-83 year at Rensselaer Central High School (Indiana) includes procedures for integrating college needs and expectations with those of high school, establishing an inservice program for involving teachers in an "across-the-curriculum" writing program, and proposing a course of study for the school's college…

There is a movement at the Community College of Philadelphia to develop an interdisciplinary humanities course for both general studies students and career students. The goal of the course is students' active appreciation of the humanities, by their learning to perform basic rhetorical analyses of historically situated works, while understanding…

The writing development of 27 first through third graders in an English/Spanish bilingual program was investigated. Samples of the children's writing were collected at four intervals during the school year, coded for computer tallying, and analyzed in terms of code-switching, spelling, punctuation and segmentation, structural features, stylistic…

The presentations and discussion at the 1980 Symposium on the Writing Crisis held in Santa Barbara, California, yielded two different but complementary perspectives on the problems of writing and writing instruction--a political perspective and a professional one. From a political standpoint there was general agreememt that the notion of a…

The effect of evaluation method on English as second language (ESL) learners' revisions of their compositions was investigated. Teacher comments, peer evaluations, and English-speaking peer reformulations were compared. Judges rated the revised compositions of 9 advanced and 14 intermediate college ESL students using the ESL Composition Profile.…

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that recent theories connecting creative problem solving with cerebral specialization might explain why some writers compose much more effectively than others. Specifically, the experiment was designed to find ways composition teachers can help students to transform writer-based prose into…

The Collaborative Probing Model (CPM) is a heuristic approach to writing across the disciplines that stresses discovery, process, and assessment. Faculty input will help the English department design an oral and written communication block that will be unified by a series of interdisciplinary videotaped presentations. CPM also uses flow charting…

Intended for researchers, teachers, local and national policy makers, and others interested in writing, this volume explores the processes and development of writing, particularly in the context of writing instruction. Following a preface, the introduction discusses various perspectives on the activity of writing, such as writing as a cognitive…

A study examined several possible indicators of the quality of student writing to see what relationship, if any, existed among those indicators and the holistic scores given by raters to compositions written for the University System of Georgia's Regents Testing Program. The indicators examined were (1) total number of sentences, (2) average…

Using technical writing in the regular freshman composition course stimulates student interest by having the appeal of novelty and expands the horizons of students in the humanities and the pure and applied sciences. To begin the unit, one might stimulate interest in the content and style of technical writing of the past by using Robert M.…

Intended for writing teachers, this paper shows how "pithy prescriptions" for writing, such as "use definite, specific, concrete language," can be misleading or wrong. To support this thesis, the paper examines a technical writing book advocating short sentences and finds that it has sentences averaging 27.8 words in one section and 30.18 in…