The assumption for many college professors is that academic discourse is a hallmark of the educated, a form of communication accepted and expected both academically and professionally. Typically, academic discourse entails the conventions of a particular discipline's writing form. A writing center tutor and administrator must find ways to teach…

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…

Strategies for effective writing include having clear expectations, developing a focused set of points, building straightforward sentences, providing specific information, making revisions, and recognizing factors that are conducive to good writing. Stresses the importance of improving writing skills through practice and includes a worksheet for…

Describes four writing-to-learn strategies used in a content area reading class for preservice teachers: admit/exit slips, looping, cinquains/progressive cinquains, K-W-L (What I Know, What I Want to Know, and What I Learned). (SR)

Many American schools are incorporating some form of English for the workplace into the curriculum. Workplace English extends traditional course work by introducing work-related reading and writing formats (memoranda to supervisors, letters to customers, and proposals for improving company effectiveness) and providing literacy skills needed in…

Explains how writing across the curriculum (WAC) is converging with active learning to be an effective learning strategy. Gives examples from content areas of home economics of WAC activities: assignment sequencing, audience identification, peer review, and informal writing. (SK)

Presents a three-part exercise that deals with poetic excess: heightened exaggeration of deliberately conflicting ideas. States that part 1 deals with hyperbole, part 2 with paradox, and part 3 with combining hyperbole and paradox in a single poem. Gives examples of students' poems using the technique. (PA)

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…

A study examined the effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed instructional routine used to teach three planning strategies to 20 fourth-fifth graders with learning disabilities. In comparison to peers who received process writing instruction, those taught goal setting, brainstorming, and organizing spent more time planning stories and…

Focuses on the validation of a writing strategies questionnaire and presents the various stages in the validation process. The questionnaire was validated using a qualitative and quantitative method with two groups of participants from the target population--advanced nonnative speakers of English. (VWL)

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.…

Provides an artistic prewriting activity to help students design the characters in the stories they write. (MG)

Discusses three perspectives on audience awareness as used in the classroom; rhetorical, informational, and social. Finds that the social perspective, with its emphasis on the transactional nature of writing, is the most productive way of dealing with audience in the composition classroom. (RS)

A fourth-grade teacher describes educational uses of a loft he constructed in his classroom. After drafting a constitution, the children brainstormed possible uses as reading/writing nook, small-group work area, and time-out space. The loft also serves as a minilibrary, private conference room, test makeup room, and staging area. (MLH)

This article examines performance in written English and Chinese in a sample of Singapore students (n=43). The implications of the findings for the Singapore classroom are discussed. (Contains 24 references.) (JL)