ABSTRACT
A successful student composition is a piece of writing that has purpose, substance, structure, and style, and that uses language that is right for the job. The basic requirement for success in a composition course is that a different kind of respect for writing be created very early in the course. Modern approaches to composition label the major phases of the writing process in somewhat different ways, and they differ considerably in the emphasis or priority they assign to each. Especially valuable to the composition teacher is sentence work that provides the bridge from the sentence to the larger units. In recent years, teachers around the country have developed new and more positive teaching patterns for such students. They have offered such students, at their level of readiness and need, bona-fide positive instruction in language and composition designed to appeal to their latent intelligence and their buried gift for language.
