An exploratory study investigated how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Using data from verbal protocols, the initial plans of 12 writers (5 experts and 7 student writers) who were working on an expository writing task were examined. The protocols were coded for types of planning. Independent measures of the…

There are two major categories of writing, expository and creative. Expository writing includes descriptive writing (description, report, taking notes, outline, exposition, summary, letter, diary, telegram, and minutes) and argumentative writing (argumentation, essay, and comment). Creative writing includes poem, narration, tale, slogan,…

The winning entries in this bulletin were chosen by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English as representing the best prose and poetry in the state for 1977. The 14 winners in the prose diviision were chosen from 357 student entries from 67 schools. The prose covers a variety of writing types including fiction, argumentation, and exposition…

Herbert L. Matthews, a veteran journalist for the "New York Times," traveled to Cuba in 1957 to interview Fidel Castro, then a revolutionary seeking the overthrow of the Batista regime. This monograph considers the impact of Matthews' newspaper articles about those interviews and of his subsequent articles about the Cuban situation and…

Research is reviewed on systematic differences in expository styles due to cultural or linguistic diversity. The critique concentrates on the method of data gathering, the usage of the categorization "Oriental," and the description of English paragraph development. An investigation is reported that consisted of an analysis of the Japanese and…

SEEN (Seeing Eye Elephant Network) is a computer program intended to help students write better essays by providing a heuristic for invention and a means for audience feedback. In the solo mode, the program prompts students to perceive what they have seen--that is, to consider the literary work in an active way. The program also remembers--like an…

Although first enunciated in 1827 by Samuel Newman, the modes of discourse--narration, description, exposition, and argument--were not very popular until formulated in 1866 and presented in the United States in a rhetoric textbook in 1885. After 1890, they were gradually accepted by the most influential rhetoricians of the day, and their use in…

This annotated list provides information about journals that might serve as markets for articles on the theory and practice of teaching writing at all educational levels. Each annotation contains the journal title, editor's name and address, and an editorial description that discusses the journal's subject area, the level of treatment, the…

Student writers should be encouraged to transform their initial writer-centered drafts into reader-based prose with discourse that is developed, shaped, and worded to take the reader's needs into consideration. The main features of writer-centered prose are egocentrism, a form that reflects the writer's thought flow, unexpressed causal relations,…

While freewriting is valuable for the beginning or basic writer, it embodies certain difficulties. Sufficient time and preparation are necessary to move from freewriting to the structured composition frequently required on course exit examinations. The student instructed by means of freewriting may later resent having to rewrite or edit. Some…

One hundred fifty children in first, second, and third grade participated in a study of the relationships between written language variables in narrative and expository writing and reading comprehension. The seven written language variables investigated included mean length of T-unit and the ratios of various sentence-combining transformations to…

Seven methods for helping students find theme topics are presented in this document. The methods include the following: setting up a library browsing table of records, books, and criticism related to the work of literature that is being studied; permitting students to choose topics based on observation of the surrounding community or reactions to…

A training program for technical writers, in which a specialized information focus is used to ask questions about a text in the process of writing and revising, is the subject of this paper. The unique aspects of technical writing are defined according to the process whereby readers extract information from text. Reader expectations are classified…

This guide offers students suggestions on keeping a journal in which they record what they do, think, and feel. The guide examines the purposes of keeping a journal; discusses writing to a correspondent who will respond to the journal entries; shows how to express thoughts and feelings about events instead of just reporting on the events; offers…