This study investigated the relationship between components of working memory (WM) and the macrostructure (e.g., planning, writing, and revision) and microstructure (e.g., grammar, punctuation) of writing. A battery of WM and writing measures were administered to 160 high-school students. Overall, hierarchical regression analyses showed that the…

This article describes a project which identified the skills and abilities in written literacy of pre-service teachers, as well as their needs in this area. An intervention to address their needs is evaluated and its outcomes assessed, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results show that it is possible to improve these…

Designed as part of a multimedia kit, this manual introduces the new punctuation system and serves as a reference source. Fifteen catalog cards illustrate the punctuations used between standard elements of bibliographic description. There is no index or table of contents. (PF)

Nominates the period as the best punctuation mark of the decade. By showing the end of a sentence, the period acknowledges both the power and the helplessness of the word. (SLD)

Students in higher learning institutions need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their reports. This is to ensure that they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply rules regarding sentence…

The use of function words in 135 essays written by deaf college underclassmen in developmental and credit-bearing English composition classes is described and compared with Standard English (SE) versions of the same essay. If student and SE versions were the same, this was considered mastery; if the student omitted a word, this was considered…

Our present mode of punctuation may survive for factual and formal work, but it is now ridiculous to button up imaginative work with full stops, semi-colons, and old-style commas that could be better zipped up with a few new-style commas or dashes. (Author)

To ensure that employees can write clear letters and reports, a first step is to make certain students improve their ability to punctuate. (Author)

A retired professor considers a semicolon as a nuisance as we can never get to the good part. He states his preferences for a comma and a colon over a semicolon.

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…

Provides a set of criteria for acceptable use of the comma splice. (DD)

This textbook is a second reader for Catholic children. The contents include age-appropriate stories and passages on the importance of emphasis, consonant sounds, marked letters, and punctuation marks. A list of Roman and Arabic numbers is also included.

The author shows the importance of punctuation: why it is used, and how it is used. (MR)

"Titular colonicity" (presence of colon in title) is observed to discriminate among degrees of scholarly character in the order specified: theoretical journals exhibited the greatest colonicity (34 percent), empirical next (18 percent) and pedagogical least (10 percent). Implications for theory and research are noted. (Author/RL)