Proposes that a systematic program of summary writing may be particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism by requiring them to focus objectively on someone else's ideas. Describes a program of summary assignments that foster dialectic thinking. (HTH)

Synectics, the making of analogies, was used with learning disabled high school seniors to provide them with a creative process that aids in developing a deeper understanding of literature. After studying Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the students completed a six-step process and produced a short writing assignment. (VW)

Describes writing assignments that help students make the transition from concrete to formal operations. The assignments confront the writers with an idea or piece of experience, ask them to respond to it and how they arrived at this response, and what other responses could be made by them or by someone else. (HTH)

Discusses situational sequencing, a concept of teaching writing that places writers within specific rhetorical contexts and asks them to produce a series of writings that develop from and relate to one another. Provides examples of such assignments. (FL)

Describes a technique, based on story grammar research, that merges the reading of a basal story with a writing lesson. (FL)

By engaging in philosophical discussion in their writing, freshman composition students can discover that writing is a mediating tool between the self and the objective world, a means to examine the nature of reality and their thinking processes. Introducing philosophical issues opens the door for the investigation of difficult and abstract topics…

Describes how two objectives--enhancing public relations thinking and producing an attractive showpiece of writing talent for the student--form the basis of a course in public relations at the University of Florida. (HOD)

To do academic work, basic writers must know how to use the forms that express mature thinking. Accustomed to the demands of speech, basic writers often rely on unspecified context to relate ideas, thus failing to establish the connections evident in well-developed thought. While able to use certain cohesive ties such as repetitions,…

Focusing on synthesis--the ability to recognize and create new ideas that subsume and relate to others--as one of the most sophisticated skills writers can attain, the articles in this journal present many ideas for teaching synthesis and a number of classroom approaches that combine the study of English with other fields. The following titles and…

Discusses three principles germane to the idea that writing is a response to its function, compares school writing with home writing, and suggests specific functions of writing that are frequently used in classrooms. (DF)

Argues that paragraph form congruent with the patterns and habits of thinking develops from the writer's sensitivity to the impact of visual images on the reader's mind. (MM)

Describes an assignment to focus students' attention on the thinking process in which students write dialogues that reproduce concretely the dialectic movement of a formal argument. Includes a more advanced exercise in which students' address the remarks of literary critics. (HTH)

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

Taking a cautious view of research into the workings of the brain, this booklet suggests that such research has merely given validity to a truth good teachers have always known: all people have two ways of thinking, a linear, logical way, and a spatial, intuitive way. It also suggests that faced with cries for "basics" in education, it…

Notes that flowcharting can be used to help college developmental writing students to think through the logical steps involved in writing. (FL)