The theories of cognitive development put forth by William Perry and by Jean Piaget are helpful in understanding the writing choices students made in responding to an assignment involving writing a persuasive essay. Some students were looking for the "Right Answer" and when they found it, they assumed that everyone would agree with them.…

The fact that students have not learned to listen may be the reason some of them cannot write. Listening is an active process requiring the same skills of prediction, hypothesizing, checking, revising, and generalization that reading and writing demand. The following three exercises were designed to make students conscious of themselves as active…

Helping first graders develop writing skills is the focus of this paper. The first part of the paper discusses 11 ideas likely to be crucial to any first grade writing program, such as the similarities between learning to talk and writing, and the teacher as the model writer. The second part of the paper outlines creative writing activities…

Intended for writing teachers, the activities in this issue blend right/left brain lessons--kinesthetic, spatial, and playful--to provide students with prewriting experience. The activities include the following: (1) creativity olympics, such as finding criteria by which large groups of students may subdivide themselves into successively smaller…

Prepared for use by graduate students who are teaching their first courses in freshman composition, this guide offers principles, strategies, and activities that are adaptable to a variety of composition programs. The 44 daily lesson plans are arranged in 16 week-long units and cover such topics as sentence combining, participles, absolutes,…

Generally, there are three kinds of software that could be used in college writing courses: word processing programs, interactive questionnaires, and text parsers. Although the benefits of these programs are well known, they still pose some problems. Word processors, for example, have been designed to "process" existing text; few have…

This paper explains the teaching strategy inherent in the model expository-paragraph program, a plan for middle-school, student writing based on imitation of and reaction to a model paragraph written by the teacher. The model paragraph provides material for the teaching of spelling, grammar, and composition skills and is a springboard for creative…

In technical writing classes writing can come alive to students, because in such classes students are knowledgeable about their subjects and can simulate writing to real audiences in business and industry rather than only to teachers. Students practice writing within determined and specified formats and to a standard style in response to…

An experiment that proved worthwhile at Lehman College is reported, in which student teams learned how and produced research papers, a requirement in half the courses on the campus. (Editor/PG)

This experimental lesson gives students practice at writing a one sentence thesis statement. Each student chooses a song or short poem for which he must provide a thesis statement. The exercise not only teaches development of the thesis statement, but also stimulates student interest and discussion. Examples are presented. (AH)

Summary of an unpublished report available from EDRS as ED 018 443, MF-

An understanding of an author's structure of ideas assists readers in comprehending a text. Three kinds of writing activities relate to a reading comprehension subskill. (1) sequencing--the logical presentation of events, times, places, ideas or steps in a procedure to accomplish a task or to comprehend an event--for which a teaching progression…

A technique sometimes known as patterned prose or case book exposition is an effective way to improve student writing while also holding their interest. It may also help solve a problem pointed to by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): students' inability to think about what they read. The technique is simple. The teacher…

These three booklets include the writing assessment tests of the Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program for grades 5, 8, and 11. The first exercise in each booklet is the writing of a story using a photograph as the stimulus. The second exercise is the revision of a story written previously. The eleventh grade test also includes a third exercise:…