A study was conducted to test the notion that effective business writing can be taught with half the "usual" number of teacher-graded papers, thereby allowing teachers to devote more of their time to more creative teaching strategies. Ten instructors and 29 sections of an informational writing class were involved in the study. The design of the…

A writing center course designed for adult learners offers features that will work in either a credit or a noncredit course. The classroom provides an informal setting and contains a variety of workbooks and audio visual materials, indexed for easy student reference. Sample paragraphs and essays illustrating different composition formats are kept…

If revision is as important as most teachers think it is and if students do not revise their work or cannot do it well, then teachers need to find ways to get students to revise involuntarily. Teachers could begin by emphasizing that revision is done primarily for the reader's benefit. That the revision stage of writing should rely heavily on…

Concerns that sentence combining has become the sole means of instruction in some college composition courses, that students are inadvertently getting the view that writing is essentially a mechanical manipulation of parts strung together, and that writing research has reduced writing to architectural structuralism made up of prewriting, writing,…

Students in four freshman composition classes participated in a study to discover if computer assisted instruction (CAI) could be designed, developed, and programed that would effectively stimulate students' inventive processes. A computer was programed with questions drawn from Aristotles' enthymeme topics. Students in the experimental sections…

This manual was developed as a resource for teacher inservice workshops on writing and also for use by individual teachers in developing their own writing skills. Areas of instruction include: development of various manuscript elements (title, table of contents, etc.); generation of unique ideas; typing and illustration; and ways to publish the…

This monograph provides educators with the fundamental knowledge needed to develop and use direct assessments of student writing proficiency. The first chapter offers a brief review of the current status of writing assessment in the United States, focusing on emerging interest in the topic over the past decade. The second chapter presents an…

Student writers should be encouraged to move beyond a "jargon" or "public discourse" model of writing. This can be accomplished by capitalizing on the students' knack for imitation by turning it into public parody. After being divided into small panels of three, four, or five members, students are assigned a voice and topic and asked to develop a…

Twelve studies relating writing apprehension to a variety of measures of self-esteem and personality are summarized in this paper. The findings reported indicate that apprehension is inversely related to self-esteem, marginally related to some personality measures (alienation, tolerance for ambiguity), inversely associated with mathematics…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. Introductory sections discuss writing fluency and the goals and procedures of a high school writing workshop for noncollege preparatory students. The work of three…

This paper describes a "scaffolding" methodology for teaching academic literacy that has achieved outstanding success with Indigenous adults returning to formal study at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. The paper begins by outlining the background to the Koori Centre program and the literacy needs of Indigenous students. We then…

Proposes Toulmin approach to logic as an organic process alternative to the battlefield model of argumentation. Shows that in a Toulmin four part argument structure--data, warrant, backing and claim--the argument field from which the warrant and the backing arise determines the data available to support the claim. Thus the relativity of multiple…

Presents a continuum of composition teaching methods ranging from whole-to-part approaches (stressing free writing and developing voice) to part-to-whole approaches (stressing spelling, vocabulary, and usage). Recounts an evaluation of these methods by preservice teachers who favored the part-to-whole approaches. (JG)

Discusses the process of writing as a way of learning and "Writing across the Curriculum Programs." Outlines the program developed at Williamson High School in Alabama that successfully trained the English department to serve as consultants to the school in developing such a program. Includes two figures and references. (MD)

Outlines the results of a followup study done in 1986 (10 years after the initial study) on why high school teachers can't effectively teach writing. The study finds that, despite reductions in class size, somewhat better teacher preparation, and higher awareness of administrators, the barriers to effective teaching of writing have not changed…