Many English handbooks and "grammars" fail to offer sound advice to writers about matters of exactness in diction and precision in sentence structure. A gap between linguists and English teachers, the literary bias of most graduate departments of English, and a national obsession with the all-powerful capabilities of common sense, have…

Dramatic texts are an ideal pedagogical tool for clarifying certain aspects of communication such as authorial stance, point of view, role, persona, impersonation, ethos, shared communal values, cultural assumptions, genre expectations, audience, performance, dialogue, and enactment. Using dramatic texts in a composition class can broaden student…

Intended for teachers, students, and for anyone who is dissatisfied with his or her understanding of writing, this book is focused on practical exercises and experiments. The first section of the book, "What Writing Is," consists of two chapters of primary interest to teachers, and provides a general orientation to the document's approach. The…

Suggests that work with the cumulative sentence can have an immediate and profound impact on student writing in the areas of grammar, organization, and specificity. Finds the use of the cumulative sentence helpful as a sentence-combining technique and for several other aspects of composition and grammar. (MS)

Presents eight short writing activities that do not involve grading papers or using the entire class period. The activities are intended to help students summarize lessons, increase comprehension and memory, organize facts and ideas, identify examination topics, and practice general writing skills. (GEA)

Describes a series of writing assignments which may be used to develop writing skills among secondary level history students. The assignments are sequenced to begin with lower level intellectual skills and build student confidence. (BSR)

Describes the WEED program, in which students write every day but not all papers receive a teacher evaluation. Discusses getting started, follow-up, collecting papers and grading, incentives, and the results of the program. (EL)

Explains how to involve students in a composition unit that requires them to complete writing assignments from various points of view. (DF)

Describes a writing assignment that leads students to see the complexities of cause and effect relationships by having them analyze a complicated court case and decide who is right and who is wrong in the case. (FL)

This paper is concerned with expression in composition. Expression includes the unity, coherence, and emphasis/purpose of a paper, and its style and/or tone. The paper first gives four alternative definitions of style and offers some specific components of style, such as word choices, sentence structures, and imagery. It then presents and…

Presents eight objectives developed in the Shoreham-Wading River School District, Shoreham, New York, for the students in the National Writing Project. (JW)

Discusses a writing exchange program that partnered high school students who are deaf and college juniors in training to become teachers of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The benefits of the program to both groups are described, including improving the writing of the high school students and providing the college students with teaching…

Fifteen high-school students with learning disabilities were taught the acronym POWER (plan, organize, write, edit, and revise) and how to use self-instruction to improve their writing performance. Strategy instruction had a significant impact on students' writing performance with an increase in the quality and quantity of written products.…

Evaluates a method of re-drafting that puts the emphasis on meaning rather than appearance of text and reveals pupils' ability to improve their written work unaided. Presents evidence concerning how a group of low ability students alter their own written work when reading it aloud. (MG)

Discusses the advantages of conference teaching in writing labs. Provides several guidelines for conducting a teacher-student conference. (MM)