In 1989, a project was undertaken to improve the student success rate in a writing course (Communications I) at a Florida multi-campus institution. Of the 489 students who had taken the course, 18% were unsuccessful in completing it in one semester. Three observed student behaviors which contributed to poor writing performance were an inability to…

Aimed at elementary school teachers interested in promoting their students' enjoyment of and skill in writing, this guide offers a number of ideas for writing activities. The guide focuses on the creative use of language and suggests ways in which students can be stimulated to write poems and stories, create metaphors, write descriptions of people…

Based on the idea that children can learn to write letters to friends and relatives as soon as they learn to write words, this visually oriented pamphlet presents practical classroom activities that primary grade teachers can use to encourage their young students to practice letter writing skills. The pamphlet contains instructions for making a…

The activity of summarization relates discourse comprehension and production in a particularly striking way: it derives writing from reading, in that the rendering of a text depends on its previous interpretation. There are two very different kinds of summaries including: abbreviated versions and brief accounts. An abbreviated version is the…

Intended to help teachers avoid the problems of privacy posed by asking students to keep journals or personal notebooks, this starter sheet outlines some of the assumptions behind journal assignments and suggests guidelines for assigning journals. The first section presents a list of assumptions about the connections between thought and language…

A freshman writing assignment sequence encouraged students to use metaphors to think their way through scientific topics, improving their writing skills in the process. The students were all women, aged 18 to 48 years, who had been journal writing for several months but who did not consider themselves competent readers or writers. Reading material…

Graduate students at Montclair State College (New Jersey) were given the option of writing a journal article for publication in lieu of composing a standard term paper. The students were instructed to write essays, not research-focused papers, since the requirements for the latter were too time-consuming and perhaps beyond students' level of…

Based on the Protocol Aided Revision (PAR) system, this series of instructional units employs user protocols to provide the writer with feedback about a reader's response to a text and to help the writer become more sensitive to textual problems that may interfere with a reader's understanding. Geared to professionals who write on the job, the…

Using music and the visual arts as stimuli in the teaching of short story writing, the six-week course described in this guide is designed to improve students' appreciation of elements common to these art forms and to increase their use of these elements in their creative writing. The guide points out that attitude surveys have shown that these…

A systematic review of 3 years of popular magazines sought to determine if articles are published that constitute rhetorical criticism of the mass media. The survey revealed that rhetorical criticism was published in a wide variety of popular magazines, but was not labelled as such. Television (TV) was the focus of most of these critical analyses,…

To determine whether Olivet Nazarene University's standard freshman writing course requirements measure favorably with those of the majority of the 75 Christian College Coalition (CCC) members, a study compared the textbooks, papers, activities, and evaluation procedures required by each institution. Stephen Witte's "National Survey of…

Following a major policy statement on writing in the primary school, this document employs a threefold approach to examining the teaching difficulties involved in responding to children's writing. The first section considers expectations that teachers have of children as writers, children's intended meanings, and various kinds of responses to…

During 1983, an observational study was carried out in four classrooms in two schools in Wellington, New Zealand, with the following objectives in mind: (1) to describe the different writing tasks, assigned to the students, (2) to outline the guidance students were given in order to help them complete their writing tasks, (3) to establish which…

Reading and writing are both creative acts of communication that use written language as a vehicle for meaning. A strong theoretical case for teaching the two processes concurrently can be built by examining points of contact between reading and writing. One such point is context concerns. The Communication Triangle model (author/audience/…

A study investigated how and when writing is used at the elementary school level to determine (1) what kind of instructional support elementary students receive, (2) what prewriting support is provided, (3) what support for revising is offered, and (4) what happens to the students' writings. Using preservice teachers as observers, data were…