It is difficult to teach a writing course that attempts to accomplish what great poetry accomplishes: the transformation of reality through language. The application of the principles of critical literacy, as outlined by Paulo Freire, may provide some assistance. In this course learners are asked to address problems in their environment and…

This report describes "Education 310," a course for the general graduate student population taught through Writing Programs for the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The report describes the contexts and needs that prompted the course; reviews the influences and resources that suggested…

Students can better experience the impact of written words by the response of a real audience. This paper describes a letter-writing activity for sixth graders in which the students first identified and discussed real-life happenings which had caused disappointments with companies that had produced faulty items. They then obtained all the…

In most traditional introductory college composition courses students are generally advised to address the teachers or some other authoritative figure as their primary audience. To supplement this traditional approach, students should also direct their discourse to audiences who are not projected as superior critics. One paper assignment that can…

Focusing on pedagogical issues in creative writing, this annotated bibliography reviews 149 books, articles, and dissertations in the fields of creative writing and composition, and, selectively, feminist and literary theory. Anthologies of original writing and reference books are not included. (MM)

The second of two volumes, this book is primarily concerned with the teaching of creative writing at any grade level, although some ideas may not be applicable to teaching very young students. This volume focuses on how to generate writing assignments, and while it is designed for classroom teachers, it can also be used by individual writers.…

Various techniques for encouraging writing among kindergarten children are described in this paper. Techniques include: (1) dictating stories; (2) establishing the format of a text by using repetitive patterns, the rhythm of the language, cumulative patterns, the familiarity of a story or story line, and familiar sequences; (3) using "I-Searches"…

In his rhetorical theory, James Kinneavy distinguishes between "aim" and "mode," but his modes do not represent kinds of reality; instead they represent more specific aims on a lower level of abstraction. Although Kinneavy's classification has been useful in the classroom, seeing the modes as specific aims yields even more…

A composition course was redesigned so that the research paper assignment might be better integrated with the rest of the course and provide a source for inquiry throughout the course. Students read a report speculating on the ecological and industrial problems the world is likely to face in the year 2000. Values clarification exercises were used…

The complexity of the writing process makes it more useful to isolate a variety of processes or parts of processes that can be taught and learned. A narrow view of writing as product leads to a misinterpretation of the process as a definite sequence--prewriting, writing, rewriting--when in fact it is much more recursive. Proper analysis of product…

Work with 12 students in a basic writing class led to the conclusion that textual analysis alone will not provide basic writing teachers with the information they need to deal effectively with student errors; instead, contextual analysis is needed, an understanding of how students compose and what their guiding concerns and basic problems are.…

According to composition researcher Ken Macrorie, the student research paper violates the pedagogical premise that writing skills are best learned when the writer says something he or she really believes in, for a specific purpose, to a well-defined audience. The problem is not solved by simply telling students that their classmates as well as…

Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

The effectiveness of the freshman composition "reader" as a source of prose models for student essays is questionable because their often long and complicated rhetorical strategies and ideas can intimidate the writers. The narrow expository patterns offered in the readers can also reduce essay writing to a matter of copying a prescribed…

This state-of-the-art report reviews the development of a philosophy of composition instruction through the decade of the 1970s in three principal forms--proclamations, do-it-yourself formulas, and research--and cites extensive examples of each. It stresses that composition teachers must continue to learn about their profession, while they resist…