Abstract words such as "tradition" are like ancient coins whose concrete images have worn away. Traditions can be of two forms--either alive, amendable, and expandable (such as those in a family's annual Christmas celebration), or dead, empty formalities. An example of an empty tradition is the strict rule in freshman composition classes that…

Students beginning a freshman composition class tend to regard writing as an editing process rather than as a process which encompasses intelligence, character, and humanity. Helping students understand and master heuristic procedures on the way to developing composition skills can be facilitated by the use of the game Twenty Questions to learn…

While freewriting is valuable for the beginning or basic writer, it embodies certain difficulties. Sufficient time and preparation are necessary to move from freewriting to the structured composition frequently required on course exit examinations. The student instructed by means of freewriting may later resent having to rewrite or edit. Some…

Seven methods for helping students find theme topics are presented in this document. The methods include the following: setting up a library browsing table of records, books, and criticism related to the work of literature that is being studied; permitting students to choose topics based on observation of the surrounding community or reactions to…

Teaching students the traditional terminology for sentences is unnecessary and provides them little or no help in improving their writing. This paper outlines the most common difficulties in students' sentences and describes a simplified working vocabulary for teaching students how to solve their sentence problems. The paper shows the methods and…

Suggests the study of individual foreign language systems as an introductory step in the pursuit of a discipline of language. (AEA)

This paper discusses the use of simple sentence-combining exercises as a way to show students the unlimited capacity of their own language. Using sets consisting of eight, six, four, and three sentences, no two students of the 27 in a freshman composition class produced identical rewrites of any one set. Such exercises are useful for instilling a…

This paper suggests that oral reading of written composition can be an effective method of sensitizing students to the presence of grammatical and logical errors. A sample paragraph is used to illustrate the technique; guidelines for use include the suggestions that students be asked to look for one particular type of compositional error (such as…

In a period of great change in higher education, proponents of the traditional Freshman English program must be sensitive to the symptoms which can easily lead to its demise. These consist of (1) permitting programs to be out of phase with the general policies of campus higher administration; (2) assuming that expertise and long experience can…

The intellectual content of freshman English includes both the subject of writing itself and the subject the student writes about. Writing has often focused on personal subjects with the assumption that the student knows himself or herself and that the student has developed a point of view allowing intelligent writing. A second source of subject…

Students should be encouraged and taught how to write more effectively. This may be accomplished by involving them in two types of writing--the journal and the essay. The student is encouraged to record in his journal what he did and thought during the day, regardless of the trivialities. The journal is never evaluated by the instructor unless the…

As a means of arguing the conviction that the teaching of imaginative literature in composition classes may prove an invaluable tool for the survival of human dignity, the following remarks were circulated among English department members. Although the relatively intangible benefits of literature and the subtlety of its processes make it more…

Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of language games, although largely undeveloped, can provide the basis for a useful analogy between the composition process and the playing of a game. Teachers can motivate students to write by presenting the composition process as a language game. The following points should prove helpful in accomplishing this end: no…

Students in college composition courses often have great difficulty learning to write research papers. They can learn to write better research papers through a series of steps: learning to read for the main point, writing opinion papers on topics that are personally meaningful to them, preparing lists of questions implicit in the opinion papers in…

After a long process of trial and error, a freshman composition course was developed on the basis of three assumptions. First, freshman English should be a course in expository writing rather than a literature course, since a great deal of time is required for students to master the complicated skills involved in effective exposition. Second,…