The study investigated EFL students' ability to comprehend and analyze advertisements and identify their stylistic features. Results of a test with sixty six EFL college students showed lexical and structural features that are easy to identify and those that are difficult to identify. Responses also reflected the difficulty level of the lexical…

This paper considers evidence from an intervention designed to raise standards in spelling and independent writing. "The Complete Spelling Programme" (McMurray and Fleming, 1998) is designed to ensure that all processes involved in learning to spell are activated and that the interaction between them is facilitated. In addition, a number…

Intended to be a guide, this book can serve as a handy reference to grammar, usage, and style for the person who needs an easy-to-use, reliable source to answer specific questions about the English language. In clear, concise terms, with lively examples, the new edition of the book provides general usage rules for parts of speech, punctuation,…

Intended for students in upper-division technical communication courses and professionals in business and government who want to learn how to edit technical writing, this book describes what technical editors do and how they do it. Throughout the book are exercises that students can use as self-tests; answer keys are provided for checking work.…

Pointing out that the style of the Associated Press (AP) defines clear writing, this revised edition of the practical and much-used AP stylebook is designed to be an essential handbook for all writers, editors, and students. The stylebook contains over 5000 entries laying out the AP's rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage. It gives…

Discusses the effects of the French government's ministerial act of January 12, 1973 concerning the enrichment of French vocabulary in the national and regional press. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Punctuation and capitalization are basic, surface features of written communication. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that authorities recognized that punctuation marks should be primarily an integral part of the sentence pattern, not an indicator of pauses. Throughout the literature on punctuation two major purposes recur--to…

The purpose of PUNCT2-CW is to test the feasibility and practicality of a data base system of computer-assisted instruction in English. To save time and to provide comparison, this course was based on the objectives, format and logic of an earlier course, PUNCT. The present data base is a sentence pool composed of certain sentence patterns called…

The teacher-made materials in this booklet evolved from the needs and experiences of migrant children at the Children's Demonstration School at New York State University College of Arts and Science (Geneseo, New York). The games and visual aids assist students in the skill areas of alphabetic letters, spelling, phonics, punctuation, and word…

Six pupils were selected at random from each of grades one through eight in a single school and were asked to write a rough draft of any length on any topic of interest to them. The 48 resulting essays were analyzed for errors in punctuation and sentence structure. Results indicated that elementary school children have difficulty in placing…

A fifth grader wanted to know what he had to do to get all his ideas the way he wanted them in his story writing "and" have the spelling, punctuation and quotation marks correctly styled. His teacher encouraged him to think about writing as a process and provided the student with three steps as guidelines for effective writing. (Author/RK)

Reports on approaches being used in journalism courses at colleges throughout the country to help students improve in grammar usage, spelling, and punctuation. (GW)

Describes an activity which successfully gets all students in a class (including those with reading disabilities) involved in constructing sentences and learning grammar and punctuation. (JM)

Presents a detailed study of two newspaper reports published on the same day and describing the same event. The study reveals (1) different attitudes concerning the need for objectivity in news reporting and (2) the complex and covert nature of the textual features through which bias is communicated. (SED)

Chronicles the history of text conventions (punctuation, capitalization, and typefaces) both by discussing and using them. (MS)