The Alliance For Excellent Education…..

has a new report up on the need for more middle school and high school writing instruction.

The report says that these 11 elements are effective to imporved writing skills.  The report does go over each one in detail.
1. Writing Strategies
2. Summarization
3. Collaborative Writing
4. Specific Product Goals
5. Word Processing
6. Sentence-Combining
7. Prewriting
8. Inquiry Activities
9. Process Writing Approach
10. Study of Models
11. Writing for Content Learning

The one problem with the report is that it is a limited review and does not go over stuff like spelling and vocabulary.