Process and Structure in Composition

This text focuses on both process and product. It's aim is to bring students to an appreciation of the qualities of effective writing and offers procedure that help student to develop skills that accomplish it. The book presents writing as a purposeful activity, it motivates students by showing that they are likely to write for a variety of reasons and people. It incorporates both experiential writing and objective writing. The book is divided into five parts so students can work on a few skills at a time while they are discovering the writing procedures that world best for them. Part I goes over background information on the writing process; it serves to make the students aware of their own processes. Part II teaches principles of description, narration, and illustration along with the need for adequate, relevant detail, sound organization, and transitions. It provides protocols which offer support in the form of procedures to follow that yield effective writing. Part III describes essay structure and how writers can depart successfully from this structure. It focuses on the process by noting seven areas of concern to a writer: generating ideas, establishing audience and purpose, organizing, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading, and gives ways to handle these seven areas. Part IV is on the reasons for writing, to share, to inform and to persuade here there is concern for both process and product. It treats audience, purpose, the nature of detail, and organization to help the student learn about narration, character sketch, process analysis, cause and effect analysis, comparison and contrast, definition, and persuasion. Part V describes the principles of sentence effectiveness and procedures to follow to achieve it. An important feature is the Process Evaluation Chart in Appendix III which provides students a means to evaluate the success of their writing processes and helps them identify which of their procedures if any should be changed.