Outlines the plain English movement, examines how it has influenced legislation and education, and discusses publications pertinent to the movement. (ARH)

Offers definitions of some jargon terms frequently used in the composition research and teaching field. (HTH)

A review of research on early writing development in preschool and elementary children touches on intentionality, generativeness, risk-taking, writing workshops and conferencing as a teaching strategy. (CL)

This investigation evaluated the differential effects of still illustrations, motion illustrations, and live modeling on lower-case manuscript letter formation of 24 kindergarten students. The study demonstrated that live modeling of letter formations may be an effective instructional technique for promoting increased accuracy of letter copying.…

Explores an insight offered by Plato in his "Seventh Letter" to explain why the traditional mode-based approach to teaching composition is so attractive and how it can be expanded upon to teach students productive inquiry. Shows how the process-based approach promotes that sort of productive change and suggests how to engage students in…

An elementary school teacher relates a method of teaching handwriting through grouping letters into families. The Hanover method, said to be particularly appropriate for children with learning disabilities, is described and examples given. (CL)

The history of the alphabet is briefly reviewed to provide background on the controversy about beginning handwriting instruction and the relative difficulty of major instructional methods (Roman capitals, ball-stick manuscript, and chancery cursive). The author suggests that a simplified version of chancery cursive can be used for beginners. (CL)

Teachers can motivate secondary learning disabled students to improve their handwriting skills by allowing students to take examinations from their notes, providing address books in which students write their friends' phone numbers and addresses, and using cooking as a means to improve handwriting. (CL)

Presents a plan that allows business education teachers to interweave subject matter content with communication skills so that students may acquire the ability to speak and write clearly. (NRJ)

This module provides paraeducators with awareness of strategies that can be used to help students become better writers. The NWREL 6 + 1 Trait[R] model is offered as an example of an approach that can be used to develop and assess student writing skills and enable paraeducators to assist teachers in the instruction of writing. Paraeducators will…

"From Asking To Answering: Making Questions Explicit" describes a pedagogical procedure the author has used in writing classes (expository, technical and creative) to help students better understand the purpose, and effect, of text-questions. It accomplishes this by means of thirteen discrete categories (e.g., CLAIMS, COMMITMENT, ANAPHORA, or…

In the 1996 book "Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Post-Modern America," Peter Sacks probes the "decay" of higher education in the United States; a decay he attributes to listless, entitled students. This paper interrogates the paradigm of Boomers and Generation Xers poised in opposition to…

In his book, "Writing with Power" (1981), Peter Elbow spends several chapters circling around the phenomenon of "voice." This paper argues that Peter Elbow's examinations of contraries and paradoxes--particularly those that concern writing voice and teaching--contain elements of "koan" practice. The paper suggests…

The radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as their online counterparts today, offer provocative examples of networked textuality, a discourse dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses of hegemony. Given its potential use for liberatory writing pedagogies, it seems…

An interview with a well-known writer reveals how he writes and how he feels about the way writing is being taught. (FL)