This anthology presents the creative writing of students in grades 7-12 discussing "Arizona treasures" and celebrating Arizona Statehood Day in 1994. The 36 poems and short descriptive pieces were chosen from over 1,000 entries from students in schools around Arizona. Entries in the anthology are grouped by grade level--grades 7-8, 9-10,…

A series of papers dealing with the development of writing abilities, focusing on: the child and his reader, the functions of writing, genuine communication, the importance of writing differently for different purposes and audiences, and the growth from the expressive to more specialized and differentiated kinds of writing. (EH)

To dramatize the need for logical organization and precise definition, students are asked to write essays describing specific everyday objects (e.g., screwdriver, nutpick). After the essay is read aloud the class tries to guess the item and comments on the effectiveness of the description. (DS)

Examines gender differences in topic choice by analyzing freshman writers' narratives of an incident they witnessed. Finds that pronounced, gender-based patterns influence text production, with women demonstrating caring and nurturing values in everyday life and men engaging in romantic fantasies of self-aggrandizement or apocalyptic fascination…

Creative inductive exercises for teaching effective writing skills are presented. Basic objectives of the inductive method include: (1) challenging students with creative options; (2) discovering the basics in sentence construction; (3) interpreting the idea of the "levels of generality;" and (4) focusing on the parallel between sentence…

A good English teacher is one who draws from his students stories that reveal the unique dignity of their personalities and the unique coloring of their experiences. The author shows how this is done, emphasizing use of student writing models as motivation, and stressing sensory diction. (Author/JB)

Recommends that teachers look for and value the freshness, naivete, humor, and wisdom in children's writing. Samples of children's writing are provided to illustrate these traits. (AEA)

A study was conducted to determine how effectively children write when motivated by viewing a work of art and what kind of art they would choose most frequently for motivation. A group of 55 students from second, fourth, and eighth grade classrooms were selected to respond to reproductions of familiar paintings with either fictional or factual…

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…

Findings are reported from a longitudinal study, involving 8- to 10-year-old students in England, which evaluated and analyzed student writing samples. The writing samples were elicited by tests intended to produce two kinds of writing: a story and a description. (IAH)

Because of their effectiveness, as well as their accessiblity as points of reference, TV commercials can provide excellent bridges in teaching concepts of good, effective writing. Specificity through metaphor is only one of the many basic writing course topics that can be effectively illustrated through TV commercials. (Author/EB)

The purpose of this study was to investigate predictors of early writing for low-income, urban students. Drawing on research and theory characterizing literacy development as a complex, integrative process, the author analyzed growth in the descriptive writing of students in Grades 1-3. The participants were 309 low-income children enrolled in 16…

This package is intended to assist tutors who are working to improve their adult students' writing skills. It is divided into three parts. The first part, which focuses on the process of writing, includes 13 units in which tutors can explore writing work, either with small groups or individual students. The units, each of which includes…

This study describes the philosophical and psychological assumptions on which radical changes in the teaching of composition might be based; presents a program for making those changes; and tests the effectiveness of that program. It is predicted that if composition students learn to use the tagmemic heuristic model as a plan for guiding inquiry,…