A lesson plan and supportive materials for an exercise in reading comprehension and cooperative writing are presented. The exercise is based on a story entitled "Testimony," in which a writer expresses feelings about a boxing match. The lesson plan outlines procedures for presentation of the exercise to the class, for the cooperative teams to…

In an effort to examine the hierarchical relations in the development of discourse topics, the narrative-descriptive essays of 55 university freshmen were analyzed in terms of L. Lautamatti's five sentence types. In type 1, the initial element is in the position of the grammatical subject, and is the topical subject. In type 2, the topical and…

The prevalence of writing errors made by third-year medical students from the class of 1981 at a large midwestern medical school was studied. The papers of 253 students taking family medicine were evaluated for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Four types of grammar errors and seven punctuation errors were analyzed, and each word…

Francis Christensen's Rhetoric Program stresses narrative-descriptive and expository writing, and offers a guide for the structure of the paragraph. In this approach, students develop their composition skills by writing sentences similar to model sentences that Christensen has extracted from the works of successful writers. The basic model is the…

The poetry unit presented in this paper is designed to teach high school students how to write poetry through personal observation, journal writing, and small group discussion. Using the unit, students progress through the stages of writing according to the following steps: observing a familiar person and noting words and phrases about that…

Suggested topics, beginning sentences, and illustrated ideas can motivate young writers, stimulate their imaginations, and give them reference points for the development of their thoughts on paper. This document offers illustrated questions and seasonal topics as writing ideas for students in the primary grades. Creative ideas for students in the…

An approach to teaching expository writing and research in support of that approach are presented in this book. The first section of the book discusses writing from given information, a technique by which teachers give students collections of nonverbal data (charts, graphs, maps, and other pictorial information) that the students must organize in…

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…

Formulae in composition can be derived and applied through a three-part process: first, analyzing passages and deriving formulae; second, writing sentences from formulae; and third, writing a composition using only sentences derivable from the formulae. Student participation in all three parts provides better motivation and demonstrates to…

Research shows that effectively used writing plans (models of text organization) promote understanding of messages and that students can learn to use these plans. Writing plans include overall plans (antecedent/consequent, comparison, description, and response), emphasis plans that highlight certain subtopics, and cohesion plans that refer to the…

AN EFFECTIVE AND PLEASANT THERAPEUTIC EFFECT CAN BE PRODUCED BY ENCOURAGING EMOTIONALLY-DISTURBED ADOLESCENTS TO LOOK AT, WORK WITH, AND WRITE UNRESTRICTEDLY ABOUT NATURAL BEAUTY. THEIR OCCASIONAL UNRESPONSIVENESS IS CHANGED TO WILLINGNESS AND THEIR CREATIVE EFFORTS ARE RE-DIRECTED FROM EXPRESSIONS OF FEAR AND DESPAIR AS THEY OBSERVE COLORFUL…

The activities and suggestions presented in this document for developing students' writing skills are based on fifteen ideas outlined at the beginning of the book. Part one, focusing on writing within the English course, suggests activities for the following: using reproductions of primary sources, writing directed to a specific and significant…

Designed for kindergarten through grade three, the material in this volume of the "Curriculum Guide for the Language Arts" is organized by grades with provision for use in a continuous or nongraded organization. An introductory section outlines the general language arts program, noting specifically the characteristics of the primary child, the…

Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

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…