Writing in the Content Areas

Book excerpt: Do you spend entirely too much time correcting your students' papers? Do your students' essays and term papers take side trips to nowhere? Is their writing riddled with mechanical errors? Do their lab reports and essays lack specificity and clarity? Writing in the Content Areas, Second Edition is for middle and high school content area teachers who assign essays, term papers, lab reports, and other writing tasks to students. This book provides strategies and tips to help teachers of social studies, science, art, etc. improve the quality of students' writing and apply national and state curriculum standards in your classroom. The strategies in this book can be integrated easily into every teacher's daily plans. They will help your students improve their abilities to - reflect before writing - organize and classify - provide detail without padding - use technical terminology correctly - avoid unnecessary words - spell correctly - take useful notes while they read and during your lectures. This book will help teachers - get what they want from a writing task - frame their assignments more precisely - correct student papers more quickly and efficiently The new second edition offers activities and strategies which involve technology (word processing, presentation programming, the Internet, and e-communications), differentiated instruction, and brain-based learning.