Outlines a theoretical perspective to account for how the writing that adults produce and use appears to get done, what it seems to be, and how it apparently functions in contemporary culture. Argues for a conceptualization of writing that is predicated on broader and more realistic understandings of text and writing than have generally informed…

Explores some of the possibilities of writing that the author realized from working with women writers and describes how, as a result of this work, she has revised her thinking about writing and the teaching of writing. (RS)

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…

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…

Describes a classification of organizational patterns for whole essays and a method by which both teachers and researchers may use it to analyze student essays. Reports the results of such an analysis applied to a controlled study of undergraduate writing. (HTH)

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…

The theoretical roots of sentence combining as a pedagogical strategy are discussed in this paper, along with recent studies of the development of written syntactic maturity. The paper examines several major sentence combining studies in detail and briefly summarizes additional relevant literature. The instructional implications of sentence…

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…

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…

A study investigated the functional relationship that exists when mental ability and language competence are separately and simultaneously measured with regard to their influence on the effective treatment of verbal information. Data were gathered from 100 men and women, aged 20-60, who were tested for language competence, reading comprehension,…

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…

A study was designed (1) to test whether adult writing is superior to adult speech in terms of organization and content and (2) to assess college students' ability to discriminate between passages differing in quality. Written and spoken passages that compared and contrasted two entities were elicited from college students and adult professionals.…

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…