Discusses three factors that should be taken into account before a writer sets out to write an essay: audience, purpose, and personality of the writer. (AEA)

A theoretically based structure-mapping model of writing from sources was proposed and tested with 34 male and 50 female undergraduates who wrote a comparison-contrast essay about 2 passages. Results suggest that the model, adapted from work of D. Gentner, is useful in describing use of sources in writing. (SLD)

A comparison between composition and literature is presented in Harriet Malinowitz's "Business, Pleasure, and the Personal Essay". The importance of praising and analyzing various interpretations of a text to English studies is emphasized.

Students' out-of-school literacy practices can complement in-school speaking and writing, if the teacher knows how to instill them. A professor analyzes how one student writes an essay and a rap on the same subject and recommends bringing hip-hop culture into the classroom to help students become academically successful.

Although writing instructors have a clear picture of how well our students can write by the end of a composition course, very rarely do we learn how well the students carry over the skills and strategies we teach them to the essays they write for other courses. I collected essays from other courses to determine how effectively students transfer…

Through the art of the essay, as conceived by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and others, college readers and writers can play a role in the continual weaving of the fabric of civilization--not by delivering lessons, or sermons, or polemical arguments, but by participating in the essayistic dialogue about what comprises a healthy human community…

For use by junior and senior high school English teachers and students in search of appropriate subjects for written compositions, this publication contains 1,237 topics compiled from a questionnaire sent to about 250 teachers. The topics are divided into categories: personal reminiscences, personal reactions, the familiar essay, description,…

Teachers as readers would have a more pleasant and stimulating job if they were reading essays that interested them. The step to reading a good paper is designing a good assignment. Some areas that need to be defined for students before they begin to write are outlined. (MLW)

Details some of the advantages provided by a testing service that evaluates student writing. (NKA)

Essays and essay tests need to be a central feature of every class. Informing students about what is inadequate in their essays and counseling them on how to improve seem to be impossible, time-consuming tasks. The use of codes or abbreviations is described. (MLW)

Recent, renewed interest in the personal in writing and teaching suggests that the late Jim Corder still has much to tell us. Editors James Baumlin and Keith Miller argue that Corder's yet-to-be-absorbed theory and scholarly praxis can contribute significantly to current debates in composition studies, especially because Corder struggles to move…

This presentation explored the nature of hypertextual or electronically enhanced essays. The purpose of the presentation was to illustrate the change in academic writing which is occurring because of electronic text forms and hyper-linking. The author attempted to show that academic writing (and the culture surrounding writing) is becoming more…

Advocates students' analysis of professionally written essays to determine how those authors represent their minds moving, pulling together, organizing, and extending" the sense data of personal experience. (Author/RD)

Presents a method for helping students learn to evaluate data, draw conclusions, and state a most probable hypothesis in writing essays. (TJ)