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Improve Writing Skills!
To graduate from high school, students must have good writing skills. They must be able to write clearly and effectively. They need to feel comfortable working with a topic, with organizing their thoughts. They must be able to reason, to use details and examples, to explain cause and effect. In short, students must understand the relationship between thought and self-expression and the corrections between writing, reading and editing.
Students ought to be taught in a way that allows them to enjoy writing. Of course to enjoy themselves, to gain confidence, they need to feel comfortable. They can become comfortable only if they have their skills in place. Students should be efficient at building paragraphs and essays. In order to attain these skills, it is important that they approach the writing process through manageable steps.
Unfortunately, many students have great difficulty writing. Some, though capable of writing sentences, are unable to form a paragraph. Some, though capable of forming paragraphs, find writing an essay to be a daunting task. Others may be able to draft an essay yet struggle with why or how to revise it.
Because of such difficulties, many students avoid or dislike writing. As a result, they end up doing poorly in almost every academic area. Not only will they have trouble completing upper level grades, they may have trouble in real life situations-expressing themselves in a letter or advancing at work beyond the most basic jobs.
Instructional software can serve as an excellent means for helping students and teachers. Writing software functions best if it provides guidance by constant interaction, raising questions, offering prompts. Writing software is most useful if it provides students with interesting topics and the chance to improve at their own pace. Students should be able to easily print or transfer work to a commercial word processing program, or locate comments from teachers.
Merit Software Paragraph Punch and Essay Punch presents the essential steps underlying good writing. The format engages students and keeps their attention. Both programs start with a choice of topics, then help students decide on a main idea. Pre-writing, in which ideas are brainstormed into an on-screen notepad, is followed by expanding ideas into sentences. Students focus next on organizational skills and coherence, revising and proofreading. They conclude by publishing or saving their work.
By using Merit Software, students become confident about doing different kinds of writing. They no longer have trouble starting to write; they learn to edit and finally, experience the pleasure of viewing finished work. Merit Software assists students to recognize their strengths and weaknesses in a non-judgmental way, enabling them to accept the challenge of improving their skills.
Numerous teachers have reported on their success using Merit Software in classrooms and lab settings. Beginners acquire basics, while more advanced students increase their proficiency are the programs. Providing a general introduction to paragraph and essay writing, are helpful to adult students doing remedial work as well as in mixed level classes.
All Merit Software programs seamlessly integrate student records into a centralized management utility. This allows teachers to manage all student records in one place, monitor students' progress, and view and print details of individual students or classes. The management system can be used on stand-alone and network computers.
To learn more about Merit Software's products for writing, as well as for reading, grammar, vocabulary and math, visit www.meritsoftware.com. Free evaluation versions of all Merit programs may be downloaded directly from the web site. The evaluation software contains a wide variety of actual exercises from the complete programs.
MERIT SOLUTIONS FOR:
RECENT QUESTIONS TO MERIT:
My daughter writes run-on sentences
My daughter can form a sentence, but her sentence are to long. She don't quite know how to put her thoughts on paper. She has difficulty structuring the beginning, the middle and the conclusion when she writes. Sometime she is all over the page with her thoughts.
12 year old with ADD
12 yr old with ADD. Cannot focus for very long and often misses the directions of the reading/writing required. Cannot keep up with the reading assignments and has very poor spelling habits. She cannot remember the rules etc. She wants to write like she speaks.
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