Shows how business letter writers at an inservice workshop improved their skills by ovserving their own writings from the viewpoint of others and by making their styles more flexible. (RL)

Investigates the use or nonuse of reading as a metacognitive monitor in first graders' composing, the patterns of contexts related to conscious monitoring by reading, and the writer's awareness of the various monitoring roles that reading plays in writing. Concludes that reading to monitor during composing emerges in different contexts for…

Reviews studies of native-language writing programs and argues that the teaching of writing in the disciplines should be left to the teachers of those disciplines; English-as-a-second-language composition teachers should focus on general principles of inquiry and rhetoric, with emphasis on writing from sources. (Author/CB)

Documents a seven-year-old child's early activities as a writer from the perspective of (1) intentionality, (2) conditions and production, (3) learning strategies, (4) composing patterns in other semiotic activities, (5) availability, and (6) literacy community, and attempts to analyze those activities through narrative, explication and argument.…

Describes a writing project designed to encourage eighth-grade students to examine their past with specific objectives to: (1) complement the speech and reading components of a theme on childhood and youth; (2) introduce or review basic mechanical skills and basic research skills; and (3) introduce basic tools of expressive writing.(NH)

Describes some experiments with evaluating pupils' written work and gives teachers a few alternative techniques for correcting students compositions and for dealing with sentence-, paragraph-, and composition-level errors. Provides examples of how these techniques have been used at the secondary school level in Africa. (SED)

This guide to the Georgia Middle Grades Writing Assessment (MGWA) serves the purpose of improving writing and writing instruction. It includes a description of test administration conditions, a sample test booklet, and a structured overview of the writing assessment. Prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading are explained in the…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1998 Writing Assessment measured student writing performance at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. Scoring guides for three different writing purposes at each grade allowed scorers to objectively evaluate students' work. This issue of NAEPfacts includes a 12th-grade persuasive writing scoring…

Designed to provide an experience as close as possible to the actual assessment, this paper presents the revised model of assessment in writing for the Michigan High School Test (HST). The revisions incorporated into the paper reflect the testing transition from the High School Proficiency Test to the HST. Session 1 looks at how well students can…

Written by teachers for teachers, this book offers the first-hand perspectives of 7 teachers who used the writing workshop approach. It offers teachers in grades 1-8 a wealth of practical advice, based on the personal struggles, accomplishments, and classroom-proven solutions of the authors. Equally valuable to teachers already using writing…

Article outlines method for having students evaluate their fellow students' compositions without knowing the authors' names. Object is to teach them to write for their peers but also to analyze work slightly better and slightly worse than their own. (PD)

A teacher discovers that the practice of collecting samples of her students' compositions motivates their writing and yields other instructional assets. (RD)

An experiment described more fully in The Effectiveness of Non-Directive Teaching as a Method of Improving the Writing Ability of College Freshmen," the author's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, School of Education, 969. (Editor/SW)