Developed by teachers and project staff members, this guide is designed to provide the opportunity for the practice and extension of basic skills in reading, writing, and language arts and to increase student and faculty knowledge of creative writing as an art. The strategies in the guide supply teachers with alternatives from which to select…

There have been minimal investigations into the related processes of learning to read and to write and there is a real need for research to study reading and writing together in the beginning stages of literacy instruction. To determine an instructional approach for this integration, the effect on language arts achievement of dialogue journal…

A step-by-step process links listening, note-taking, composing, and revising in order to make a college level music writing assignment a more instructive and fulfilling exercise. In order to help them focus on the music, students are given a chart in which they divide the piece of music they are listening to into events, and then match these…

A study examined the revisions made in expressive and persuasive compositions by 14 good and 14 average writers in grades 5, 7, and 11 to determine if grade- or ability-related differences occurred in the quality and kinds of revisions made and if revisions differed for the two types of compositions. Students wrote compositions one day and revised…

Developmental writing students pose particular problems for composition instruction because of their pragmatic orientation and because they come from and live in an oral, nonliterate culture. The writing instructor must create writing situations that make real-world demands and bring about real-world consequences, and assign topics that students…

"Practical rhetoric" is a narrowing of classical rhetoric because it no longer shapes public opinion but is increasingly shaped by it, specifically by special interest groups formed around and geared to what a selected audience wants to hear. In the teaching of composition, this pluralism of rhetoric leads to fragmentation and specialization, and…

The information contained in this report describes the 1982 Manitoba (Canada) Writing Assessment Program and the results of student performance on the grades 3, 6, 9, and 12 writing tests. Various sections of the report provide the following information: (1) steps in the assessment program and procedures for comparison with the 1979 assessment;…

One approach to the development of writing skills at the upper high school level involves modeling, objectivity, revision, and editing. Modeling requires the teacher to reproduce one major writing assignment so that students can observe directly how the teacher attacks the assignment, completing it within the same time frame as they themselves…

Group activities in the classroom can be a useful way to explore various standard rhetorical patterns. For descriptive writing, students can select and write about unsigned collages made by classmates. The writer can try to find a unifying theme that characterizes the artist's personality. A narrative component can be added to descriptive writing…

A study investigated the effectiveness of peer critiquing and the use of writing models in the preparation of scientific reports. Primary trait scoring was used to evaluate laboratory reports on exercise physiology written by four different groups of sophomore biology majors: (1) a reference (control) group that prepared for writing reports with…

The writing lab at a Florida two-year technical institute is designed to help students fulfill the writing requirements for their technical degree programs. In the lab, developmental students take composition courses that may be substituted for traditionally required composition courses in their programs. Some students take additional writing…

Reported in this monograph are the results from a survey of composition teachers in the City University of New York (CUNY). The questionnaire used for the survey sought (1) to obtain quantitative data about teachers' instructional practices and about their perceptions of the impact of the Writing Skills Assessment Test (WSAT) of minimum writing…

This guide to the primary education program was developed for use in kindergartens in Duval County Public Schools, Jacksonville, Florida. An overview of the program is followed by a section on preplanning, which deals with curriculum planning, classroom arrangement, centers and materials, classroom management, themes for the year, lesson plans for…

Each written by a classroom teacher and based on the experience of that teacher working with his or her students, the articles in this collection are an extension of the Bay Area Writing Project assumptions. Many contain samples of writing done by students in response to the writing tasks described. After a preamble that discusses what is already…

This book records activities of a New York City Writing Project seminar and the writing of some of the 35 students in it. The account reflects how the students wrestled with different points of view, learning how to respond in writing groups and discovering themselves as writers in their process journals. Among the appendixes is a guide for…