Rather than giving basic writing students handbook and workbook exercises to direct their proofreading, teachers can use a monitoring system that teaches the students to recognize problems and to systematically monitor and eliminate the difficulties. After completing two or three assignments that include several drafts, students copy out all the…

Arguing that writing teachers can neither ignore the teaching of grammar nor expect it to succeed if taught in the traditional way, examines the methods, organization, exercises and terminology of the freshman English handbook, identifies problems, and suggests alternatives to helping students satisfactorily edit their papers. (JG)

Most students today have been reared on television and have had only slight brushes with the parts of grammar. Nevertheless, a variety of sentence pattern exercises and sentence combining lessons based on the students' own writing can be used to augment, challenge and improve students' writing skills and vocabulary. In the first exercise, students…

Describes a sequence of four studies that explored how people composed sentences while writing expository essays. Among the findings were that the sentence composition process was often guided by a writing plan, and the most frequent changes accomplished by revision of parts were word choice, aspect of meaning, and grammatical structure. (HOD)

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

This compilation of articles on computer applications in writing instruction deals with the areas of prewriting, editing and grammar, word processing research and applications, and programs for the writing process. It contains the following papers: "Recollections of First-Generation Computer-Assisted Prewriting," by Hugh Burns; "Computer-Based…

Examines two studies: one that shows that competent to highly competent writers find writing centers beneficial, and the other that shows that faculty continue to think of writing centers as suited to remedial students and surface level corrections. Attempts to glean from these studies important information that could act as a corrective to all…

To learn correct grammar, developmental students must practice writing correctly. However, the traditional exercises offered in handbooks, workbooks, and textbooks not only fail to provide habituation in correctness, they actually provide practice in "wrongness." Instead of isolating individual problems, they promote confusion by linking them.…

This paper begins with a literature review of research on syntactic maturity, defined as the developmental stages from one- and two-word utterances to the hierarchical structures of adult speech, and seeks to answer questions in the context of past and current research in this area. It attempts to study some of the ramifications of the movement…

Presents eight separate short descriptions of teaching tips or classroom activities for composition classes submitted by teachers, including tips on writing exchanges, grammar problems, peer evaluation, revision, mock quizzes, critical thinking regarding television news, computer-assisted commenting, and an educational and entertaining end-of-term…

Presents a method of evaluating writing that (1) reduces teachers' marking time; (2) facilitates rather than judges student writing; (3) emphasizes performance rather than finished product; (4) provides double feedback, before and after revision; (5) helps bridge successive drafts by requiring immediate revision; and (6) improves student writing.…

As a step toward developing appropriate instructional techniques to help learning disabled college students, mechanical errors were compared in the expository essays and controlled stimulus passages (rewrites) of 15 learning disabled, 15 normal, and 15 basic writers at the college level. Analysis of both types of writing samples showed that…

A student-centered noncredit writing course for students of English as a second language, designed to alleviate the problems of diverse class membership, consists of a series of composition assignments with topics determined by class interests and composition length determined by the student. The entire class participates in prewriting activities;…

A study analyzed the ability of 31 advanced students of English as a Second Language (ESL) to monitor their own use of article and verb errors in their compositions. Subjects were 31 foreign graduate students enrolled in an advanced composition course at Iowa State University. The two categories of grammatical errors were monitored in three…

Reflecting current practices in the teaching of writing, the exercises in this compilation were drawn from the journal "Exercise Exchange." The articles are arranged into six sections: sources for writing; prewriting; modes for writing; writing and reading; language, mechanics, and style; and revising, responding, and evaluating. Among the topics…