Discusses alternatives to formal grammatical analysis to teach syntax and usage, including sentence combining, expansion, and modelling/imitation; transformation exercises; and inductive grammar. Considers ways of teaching editing/proofreading skills, including peer editing, teacher/student conferences, and selective marking of errors. Discusses…

Prepared as part of a project designed to provide an objectively measured indication of the quality of student writing in one school district, this paper presents analyses of the syntactic complexity of the argumentative and narrative writing of more than 500 seventh and eighth grade students and of the mechanical errors found in that writing.…

This study compared a grammar program using a linguistic approach with one using a traditional approach to determine how each affects children's ability (1) to construct sentences which have variety in structure, and (2) to comprehend silent reading. Five experimental and five control classes of fourth-grade children were randomly selected from…