Comments on five basics about composition and composition teaching essential for all English teachers. (Author/RK)

Relates personal experiences in reading and writing poetry with a group of elders in an attempt to learn something about their use of language, their life stories, and themselves. (HOD)

Considers register (factors that vary in situational contexts and produce differences in meaning intent and meaning exchange) variance with its accompanying language transactions during written language events involving children and adults. Illustrates register variance with the writing and drawing of a four-year-old and a first-grader. (HTH)

Based on the proposition that if people want their electronic messages to get the results they desire, they will need to adopt and practice effective communication strategies, this book introduces strategies that make e-mail messages, Web site text, and newsgroup postings effective. To this end, it teaches how word choice can affect meaning, how…

Discusses an approach to teaching second language composition which emphasizes (1) careful analysis of model texts from a limited, but well-defined perspective and (2) the application of text manipulation techniques developed by the word processing industry to student compositions. (EKN)

Describes the development and teaching uses of the Gender-Specific Language Scale (GSLS), an instrument designed to assess recognition of sexist language. Results from three experiments assessing GSLS reliability and validity are presented that suggest that the GSLS measures a different construct than an essay questionnaire used in previous…

In academic writing, non-native speakers tend to misuse the phrase "on the contrary", confusing it with "on the other hand". Sources of guidance to usage in English almost invariably describe it as a phrase of contrast or contradiction. This may apply to how the phrase is normally used in dialogue, but an analysis of the phrase as usually…

This article describes five political scientists' interview-based accounts of appropriate and inappropriate use of the pronouns "I" and "we" in academic writing. The informants talked about pronoun use with reference to one of their own journal articles and also by referring to other informants' texts. Beliefs about appropriate…

There are three distinct ways that the metaphor of "clarity" is employed in rhetorical history and in daily interchanges, correlating to three ways of looking at language, in turn correlating to three approaches to teaching writing. What is being proposed is more of a taxonomy than a pedagogy, but this taxonomy is important because of…

In both speaking and writing, the goal is communication with the intended audience. Rejecting the view that rhetoric is based on an established set of conventions, this article examines the writings of Charles Dickens as models of rhetorical expression. Passages from Dicken's novels illustrate how the writer violated grammatical rules and broke…

The opportunity to discover the flaws in newspaper letters to the editor and to evaluate the ensuing consequences can help beginning persuasive writing students, who have had little practice at forming arguments, begin to conceptualize for themselves the ways that principles of persuasive discourse apply in particular writing situations. The study…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. Methods are illustrated for teaching students to recognize dishonest language and to write honestly themselves and include cliche/euphemism avoidance techniques,…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. This pamphlet contains five papers that are concerned with the ways in which writing changes under the influence of who it is for and what…

This paper describes the preliminary results of research currently underway concerning sex-based differences in written composition. Sixty themes written by college-age native speakers of English were chosen for study. The themes were typed exactly as they had been written. No corrections were made. They were numbered alphabetically by the names…