Presents results of a survey carried out in 1977 to determine the attitude of contemporary French writers toward the importance of punctuation. Questionnaire responses, obtained from over half the 80 authors polled, are discussed. (AM)

Good writing is good sentences. It is a simple truth that many in the business of teaching writing have strayed from. Good writing is a first sentence that makes a reader want to read the second sentence, a second sentence that makes a reader want to read the third, and so on. Erika Lindemann suggests that certain types of sentence instruction can…

Investigates the influence of handwriting style and composition errors on the marking of essays. (DS)

Special issue devoted to the topic of standard spoken usage. (VM)

"Writeability" is concerned with helping writers and editors produce materials on easier readability levels. A major input of most readability formulas is vocabulary difficulty. One way to increase readability is to use simple vocabulary or shorter words since word frequency studies show that more common words are shorter. The other…

Just as a reader must bring an experiential conceptual background to the printed page, so must he bring an ability to recognize the graphic cues that signal meaning. The graphic cues or structural meaning works as a system the description of which can be outlined in three parts as the vocabulary, the structure, and the sound. What has been…

The Sentence Combining Test was administered to three groups of college students (N=45) identified as learning disabled (LD), normal, and basic (underachieving) writers. Among results was that LD writers made a higher percentage of meaning errors across all subtests. (Author/JW)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

Even English speakers do not always know when to use a hyphen. Examples are given of some fairly clear-cut cases where the hyphen should be used, leading to the formulation of some usable rules. (IFS/WGA)

Writing samples were analyzed for syntactic maturity, productivity and word selection; for conventions such as tense and number markers and number agreement; and for spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Only spelling performance proved significantly different in favor of low achievers. (Author)

Punctuation in its elocutionary function serves as a set of instructions for reading aloud. In its syntactic function, it serves to convey meaning. Results of a study indicated that many people retain the belief in the elocutionary purpose of punctuation and are insensitive to its syntactic function. (JD)

The "Write a Sentence Test" was developed for use in the evaluation of student writing abilities in association with a project in Memphis, Tennessee. This paper discusses ways of administering and scoring the test, decisions concerning modification of the test, and experiences when the test was administered to sample subjects. All forms…