Provides details of a mini-course, developed in cooperation with the school's study skills center, that is the essential feature of a program designed to help students in the business communication curriculum improve their writing skills. (RL)

Suggests that part of the problem with instruction in mechanics has to do with the intuitively unappealing nature of most of the "rules" that have remained unchanged for a century. Discusses problems with current rules on the use of the apostrophe. Presents a one-page reproducible handout that summarizes a technique to teach usage of the…

Looks at correctness in writing as a sociolinguistic phenomena that conveys information about the author in terms of his or her capacity to write as a college student and in a form commensurate with academic standards. Concludes that correctness has a sociolinguistic role crucial to the field of basic writing. (TB)

Curriculum-based measures of written expression have traditionally used total words written or correct word sequences as indices of students' skill levels. This investigation attempted to determine whether additional hand-scored and computer-scored measures might share more variance with the criterion measures. The new measure, correct punctuation…

Offers a step-by-step guide to teaching elementary school children conventions such as punctuation, spelling, and grammar and includes a sample minilesson and 10 tips for teachers. An interview with author Donald Graves answers questions about teaching writing. (SM)

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "While the man was visiting the children who were surprisingly pleasant and funny played outside." Participants produced more transitive sentences following such temporarily ambiguous sentences than following unambiguous sentences that were…

In her much-quoted statement of principles "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf wishes for "a woman's sentence." In that essay, she doubts that a woman can use the same sentence as a man to write literature, because "the weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything…

An approach to teaching grammar through the use of speaking and listening activities is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): Why practice the language simply by completing worksheets or exercises in the grammar book? There are various ways to teach language through speaking and listening exercises. These are several…

Perhaps because of their familiarity with joke telling, students often do their best writing when using humor. In both telling jokes and creating humorous works, students need to develop a strong sense of audience, an awareness of the importance of vivid description, a strong sense of purpose, and the ability to use punctuation for effect. The…

Phonological rules based on "stress-terminal pattern" (the principle that a phonological phrase has one primary stress and one terminal juncture requiring a mark of punctuation) can be used to improve punctuation in composition. These rules require that the writer be able to speak sentences at a normal pace with intonation appropriate to the…

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…

During the years 1968-1971, the Computer-Assisted Instruction Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin has developed and implemented three major program designs for use in teaching English punctuation and usage. The initial design was a frame-by-frame approach in which each instruction was prepared by the author and coded separately. The…

Correct spelling, punctuation marks, and spelling accents must be taught in the beginning Spanish course. Accent marks make a difference in the interpretation of the written word. Rules govern the placing of exclamation and question marks and make up an integral part of written Spanish. Teachers have a duty and a responsibility to teach these…

In order to determine if there is a significant difference in the capitalization skills, punctuation skills, and word usage and sentence structure recognition skills of students who have had one year of shorthand instruction, two sample groups (shorthand and non-shorthand) were obtained from three English populations (no English or nongrammar…

Some new ways to capitalize on an old truth: When you begin with your students' own interests, they'll learn faster and remember more. (Editor)