The English program at DePauw University (Greencastle, Indiana) has undergone many changes. Today, English majors at DePauw may choose from either a literature or a composition course of study. The capstone course in the 70-year-old composition program is the seminar, in which students write whatever they choose and distribute copies to the other…

A study designed to examine the differences in quality ratings that 20 teachers in each of three senior high school curricular areas (business, English/social studies, and mathematics/science) gave to samples of written argument by college freshmen also investigated the relationship between the three groups of quality ratings and eight syntactic…

In addition to introducing students to the basic skills of public relations writing, a public relations course should move students toward public relations "thinking" and provide them with tangible evidence to demonstrate their writing talents to a prospective employer. One such course begins with a brainstorming exercise that lends…

The King Construct Scale, which measures student attitudes about writing, contains 25 bipolar constructs which reflect four major areas of the writing process: purpose of the writing, source of the writing, audience the writing is for, and mode the writing takes. The scale was developed by collecting the data with Pianko and Rogers'"P & R…

In an investigation of the effect of instruction in five components of the writing process on the syntactic complexity and the writing quality of high school students, 48 students received instruction in the following areas: discovering a subject, creating a design, developing a sense of audience, learning to use specifics, and learning to…

Stylistics, the art of making effective choices in writing, depends on synonymy. This means that writers, depending on the purpose, the audience, and the context of their messages, will rephrase those messages to improve their effectiveness. Paraphrasing messages to fit the needs of particular situations depends on a number of stylistic variables…

The intellectual content of freshman English includes both the subject of writing itself and the subject the student writes about. Writing has often focused on personal subjects with the assumption that the student knows himself or herself and that the student has developed a point of view allowing intelligent writing. A second source of subject…

Virtually all composition research has been done about teaching methodology; little research about the theory of the process of composition has been done. A 1964 study, the first on the composition process, used as an operational definition the concept of the composing process as being a series: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. This linear…

The role of invention in contemporary rhetorical theory poses two problems: how to deal systematically with both the general topics and the more specific topics that respect the different modes of knowledge, and how to incorporate these topics into a conceptual framework that includes other elements of discourse for which theories or partial…

Theory and practice, especially in education and more particularly about the composition process, stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, otherwise practice gets gimmicky and theory becomes dogmatic. The role of theory is to define purposes, figure out why something works so it can be repeated, give perspective, and free teachers from…

The difficulty of obtaining usable information about the mental processes involved in the use of language has been a major obstacle in the design of effective writing programs. The antipsychological, behavioristic bias of American linguistics, which prevented any study of the deeper mental processes of language production, was remediated in part…

After reviewing the benefits of the in-class publishing of student writing, this paper describes such a college freshman publication and the process of producing it. The reasons presented in support of publishing student work include the observations that most students have no other opportunity to publish; that the composition classroom should be…

A brief overview of the history of teaching writing reveals a shift from an emphasis on the composed product to the composing process and provides writing teachers who work one-to-one with students with a theoretical seven-stage model of the composing process: starting-point, exploration, incubation, illumination, composing, reformulation, and…

Noting that many students appear to lack the skills necessary for composing an academic paper, this paper contends that such students may possess a field dependent cognitive style (termed "holistic") that is at odds with the needs and expectations of the college world's field independent cognitive style. Pointing out that cognitive style permeates…

David Bleich's work in reader response and James Britton's composition research provide a theoretical justification for the use of composition in the literature class and for the use of literature in the writing class. Britton has found that talking about writing is valuable since talk is more expressive than writing. In the literature class…