Discusses problems and patterns in student journalistic writing. (HOD)

This workbook is designed as an introduction to the "Editor in Chief" series, which reinforces the rules of written English. In this workbook, student first review the rules of grammar and mechanics using multiple-choice questions; then the students learn to apply these rules in context by editing stories in a variety of formats. This "Beginning"…

Outlined are devices to educate parents about composition concepts," i.e., what there is to learn in learning to write well. (RY)

Revision of a paper presented at meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Minneapolis, Minn., April 1968).

Discusses how students can thoroughly understand the process of revising a few sentences by discussing revisions with a partner, reading the revisions of the same sentences by other students, and reviewing the best revisions with the whole class. (RS)

Using straightforward, easy-to-understand language, this handbook of English provides hundreds of examples to illustrate in specific detail what is proper in all areas of English grammar, style, and writing. The handbook provides learning exercises at the end of every chapter for a thorough review of the concepts covered in the chapter. The first…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

Most students today have been reared on television and have had only slight brushes with the parts of grammar. Nevertheless, a variety of sentence pattern exercises and sentence combining lessons based on the students' own writing can be used to augment, challenge and improve students' writing skills and vocabulary. In the first exercise, students…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The primary purpose of this booklet is to provide useful class and small group discussion tools for allowing students to inductively discover certain fundamental characteristics of language structure and to directly relate the study of sentence structure to the development of writing skills. A series of experiments is provided to serve as models…

The effect on student writing of Communications I classes at the University of Northern Colorado was tested using 95 students studying under 5 different teachers and 15 students who had participated in a previous study. Two paragraphs, one written at the beginning of the term and one at the end of the term were rated for organization, development,…