A study attempted to measure the effects of contingency management, conditions that essentially forced subjects to write, on their writing productivity and creative ideas. Subjects were 27 published college faculty with doctorates, divided into three groups of nine. The first or contingency group participated in a "baseline phase" during which…

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…

There are many teaching positions for writing instructors outside the classroom, such as continuing education programs for business and professional people. Instructors interested in tapping this market should watch for opportunities and not overlook small or unusual jobs. They should also clarify their goals, start small, and remember the…

One way to help basic writers become more effective writers is to encourage them to consider and write about what they do in writing--the problems they face and the satisfactions they glean. Using a scheme that involves using a hierarchy of stages of abstraction in discourse, students can be led to development of their writing skills. One such…

A study diagnosed the nature of different text production abilities of Swiss grade 5 and grade 9 students, and of adults, and diagnosed good and poor writers' differences within each of these three age groups. Subjects, 36 in all, were uniformly divided between 11- and 15-year-old students from the Bernese secondary school and high school…

A study compared text summaries produced by French high school students and those written by experts. The study's objective was to determine how language users distinguish the essential from the peripheral information, to describe the summarizing process, and to apply the macrostructure theory to the process of summarizing. The summarized texts…

Because the Texas Department of Human Resources (DHR) was demanding writing competency from its employees, and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) had a supply of competent writers in the form of undergraduate and graduate English majors, UTSA established a writing laboratory at the DHR. A three-credit course was developed to briefly…

Proposing the theory that adult basic writers can learn to write better if they are taught to understand the mental processes that writing requires, this paper presents a brief teaching guide for systematic instruction in these processes. The paper first examines how ideas develop and then outlines the mental processes in rhetoric. Discussions of…

The hypothesis that professional writers would be judged superior to college students on both holistic and analytic evaluations was only partially confirmed when four teacher-evaluators rated the anonymously submitted compositions of 64 college students and 5 professional writers. On the holistic scale the professionals did not distinguish…

Input from a course syllabus in advanced university level English as a second language composition was compared with student intake as manifested in the linguistic product (i.e., compositions). The frequencies and types of classroom, teacher, and textbook explanation of sentence control, paragraph organization, and rhetorical control were…

A study was conducted to test the following four hypotheses: (1) more subject-area writing will produce better writing, (2) more subject-area writing will reduce writing apprehension, (3) the frequency and amount of learner-centered writing about a subject will increase learning of that subject, and (4) concepts students write about will be…

This paper compares the prescribed American and Chinese letter writing formats as outlined in texts and examines actual letters from American and Chinese writers to determine how they compared to these formats and, if they differed, to identify possible reasons for these differences. After teaching students of Mandarin Chinese a basic lesson on…

This paper describes an ongoing literacy research project involving writing samples and observations of workers in a state social service agency, a large labor union, and several scientific laboratories. Procedures discussed are: (1) selecting participants who were willing to give 16 hours of interview time over the course of a year; (2) selecting…

A case study investigated the writing processes of an adult native speaker of Portuguese in a number of writing tasks in his native language (L1) and in English, his second language (L2). Writing samples over a 14-month period were examined. Most data were collected in thinking aloud protocols for 10 written tasks of varying degrees of familiarity…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a 5-hour- on-the-job writing course compared to a 30-hour college business communication course. The short business English refresher course focused on grammar, punctuation, and spelling; audience analysis; and direct, negative, and persuasive letters and memos. The college course focused on…