Reading students whose reading skills are being improved need to learn expository writing in order to be able to organize and express thoughts on paper. This document presents a systematic approach for teaching writing as part of the total communication process and consists of five units. "The Expository Paragraph," designed for use in a skills…

Assigning students to write resource papers about the library provides the instructor with the opportunity to teach about basic rhetorical methods and gives students the chance to become acquainted with resources they should know. Four different types of papers which give students a variety of writing experiences are a description of two reference…

This curriculum guide provides suggested learning activities for a sequential program in composition skills for grades K-12. The composition skills discussed are listed in developmental levels, not necessarily in terms of grade levels. It is recommended that the student become familiar with basic skills before progressing to the more complex ones.…

This book discusses basic craft elements of writing, illustrates from adult and children's literature what constitutes an engaging passage of description, and then illustrates how that craft can be taught in a workshop environment. In addition, this book includes involvement experiences that help teachers experience these craft elements. After an…

Maintains that the five-paragraph essay formula confuses and alienates students and undermines the basic goals of writing instruction. Advocates developing a repertoire of alternatives for teaching form. Suggests that using the metaphor of the essay as journey is one such teaching alternative. (SR)

Francis Christensen's Rhetoric Program stresses narrative-descriptive and expository writing, and offers a guide for the structure of the paragraph. In this approach, students develop their composition skills by writing sentences similar to model sentences that Christensen has extracted from the works of successful writers. The basic model is the…

An approach to teaching expository writing and research in support of that approach are presented in this book. The first section of the book discusses writing from given information, a technique by which teachers give students collections of nonverbal data (charts, graphs, maps, and other pictorial information) that the students must organize in…

Research shows that effectively used writing plans (models of text organization) promote understanding of messages and that students can learn to use these plans. Writing plans include overall plans (antecedent/consequent, comparison, description, and response), emphasis plans that highlight certain subtopics, and cohesion plans that refer to the…

The activities and suggestions presented in this document for developing students' writing skills are based on fifteen ideas outlined at the beginning of the book. Part one, focusing on writing within the English course, suggests activities for the following: using reproductions of primary sources, writing directed to a specific and significant…

The writing of students at colleges of education about their teaching experiences and the writing done for them by children in infant and junior schools comprise this account of attempts to answer such questions as "What makes children want to write?" and "What is the relation between a writer's experience and imagination?" Excerpts from college…

As an alternative to the conflict among college composition teachers who are either repressive and authoritarian or permissive and lenient, a middle course offers teachers the latitude of encouraging free writing for some students and directed writing for other students, both of which may be responses to students' needs to express themselves. This…

In a series of articles based upon doctoral studies, this issue examines composition instruction in the elementary schools. The first article provides a historical background for examining current practices in elementary composition programs, the second article discusses the relationship between form and content, and the last three articles look…

The material in this book, contributed by teachers in the Los Angeles area, consists of instructional assignments and successful strategies for teaching creative writing at the secondary level. Sample lessons are grouped under broad categories (getting started, writing prose, writing verse, and miscellaneous instructional gambits) and contain…

This paper describes an experimental exploration of special procedures used in a game-like online expository writing experience that was designed to help preservice language arts teachers develop descriptive writing skills. Participants were asked to describe a target picture within a picture set to their cohorts in an online discussion in order…

Written syntactic complexity is considered in relation to the four modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description). In a study of 153 children at three ability ranges within each of three grade levels (three, four, and five), syntactic complexity was found to differ significantly across the modes. The range of syntactic…