For beginning college students, effective paraphrasing is the most difficult of the research-writing skills they must learn and demonstrate. Many students understand summarizing, and the frequent appearance of unwieldy block quotations in their essays suggests their preference for using a source's exact words. But the art of paraphrasing escapes…

Adapts a classical concept to the composition classroom in a prewriting exercise which offers a wide range of benefits. (RS)

Suggests that student's expression in composition will improve by daily journal writing. (HOD)

Describes a heuristic for writing about literature, especially drama and fiction. Questions from the heuristic cover character, plot, setting, and literary devices. (HTH)

Claims that self-evaluation instruments strengthen students' ability to evaluate their own writing and improve writing instruction. Argues that self-evaluation exercises should (1) help students evaluate their writing, (2) demystify teachers' grades, (3) encourage students' awareness as writers, (4) require written responses from student, and (5)…

Offers four suggestions for making composition instruction more useful to the student. (HOD)

Presents a rationale for organizing a writing course around a feminist perspective and provides course outlines with appropriate readings and writing activities. (HTH)

Offers five tips from writing teachers on writing activities that work well in their classrooms. (SR)

Suggests a method of tapping students' visual literacy to reach four interconnected pedagogical aims by using a brief film segment in conjunction with a series of writings tasks. Offers two additional incentives regarding teacher's knowledge of film and the necessary element of play to keep students engaged. (JK)

Presents sequential approach to writing instruction that draws on power of rhetoric to help students connect with real world. Exercises focus on country's literacy problem and allow students to work with all kinds of discourse in logical sequence while learning to summarize, to analyze their own and their classmates' styles, and to work with…

Describes sample essay topics from an introductory course in philosophy that can be used to engage students in values analysis, values consciousness, and values criticism. (AEA)

Describes a method for teaching writing in which a series of passages are rewritten by the student, altered by progressively difficult transformations and manipulations, as an alternative to grammar instruction. (HTH)

Describes a freshman composition class in which students write essays about pollution. Explains that students classified and divided problems, cited examples, explored pollution's processes, used narrative, and offered comparisons. Describes how students prepared cause-and-effect oral presentations and then wrote persuasive letters. Concludes that…

Includes five teaching suggestions: "From Marvell to Tennyson to Eliot: Or Are You a Prufrock or a Ulysses?" by Bill Shaw; "Attendance and Contact Records," by Kaye E. White; "Viewer Mail," by Paul Hunter; "Electronic Journal," by James W. Smith; "Responding to a Need-for-Advice Question," by John…

Contains one-paragraph descriptions from six college English instructors describing successful lessons and techniques used in the classroom. Covers collaborative teaching with letter writing; notetaking and paraphrasing; a first day ice-breaking activity; a writing development check; linking assignments in basic writing; and a descriptive writing…