Demonstrates that Alan Purves's "Elements of Writing about a Literary Work" can be used to generate insights into literature. (DD)

Procedures are described which yielded very high inter-judge reliability in grading creative writing.

Most students seem not to have learned the transformational grammar their teachers said had been taught.

A lowered heart rate is associated with involvement in reading.

The importance ascribed to creative activities varies cyclically, as currents of thought swing from progressive to conservative and back.

No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

Presents a rationale for studying psycholinguistic aspects of the writing process and outlines a model of writing based on a psycholinguistic model of talking. Offers an analytical study of 450 syntax errors written by college students demonstrating the usefulness of studying writing as derivative of normal speaking processes. (HOD)

Statements from the "Composition Opinionnaire" (NCTE, 1971) were grouped into four scales to measure teacher attitudes toward the importance of standard English, linguistic maturity, defining and evaluating writing tasks, and student self-expression in the instruction of written composition. (HOD)

This study examined whether the use of complex headed nominal structures resulted in a higher qualitative rating of a passage than the use of simple headed nominal structures and whether the use of more mature vocabulary resulted in a higher qualitative rating of a passage than the use of simple vocabulary. (HOD)

A 1979 analysis of student expository writing showed that holistic quality scores awarded by teacher-raters were influenced to a greater extent by essay length and freedom from spelling errors. A replication of that investigation using a sample of students' narrative writing produced the same findings. (HOD)

Investigates how writers plan to produce discourse for different purposes--to report, to generalize, to persuade--as well as how writers plan for sentence level units of language. To learn about planning, an observational measure of pause time was used. (HOD)