The Online Business Center

Writing is a life skill. As students move from grade to grade, writing skills are critical for academic progress. Students who have difficulty putting their thoughts into writing struggle to succeed in social studies, science, and many areas other than English language arts. Because good writing requires good thinking, the act of writing actually helps students learn to clarify their thoughts and focus their ideas. In addition, students who write well are usually strong readers. Why? In very simple terms, a writer must be able to read what he or she has written and recognize whether the words mean what the writer wants them to mean. Therefore, every time a student is writing effectively, that student is also reading carefully and thoughtfully. In this way, writing and reading reinforce each other. Students who have strong writing and reading skills will have more opportunities available to them throughout their lives, in both education and employment, than those who have not learned these skills.
The objectives for the seventh grade writing test are listed below.

Objective 1 : The student will, within a given context, produce an effective composition for a specific purpose.
Objective 2 : The student will produce a piece of writing that demonstrates a command of the conventions of spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, usage, and sentence structure.
Objective 3 : The student will recognize appropriate organization of ideas in written text.
Objective 4 : The student will recognize correct and effective sentence construction in written text.
Objective 5 : The student will recognize standard usage and appropriate word choice in written text.
Objective 6 : The student will proofread for correct punctuation, capitalization, and spelling in written text.

The Society issues several publications that are produced under the direction of the executive director, who acts under the general guidance of the AMS Council. Foremost among the Headquarters publications is the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the official organ of the AMS, which has been published since 1920. The Bulletin contains a wide variety of information, including scientific papers of a scope so broad that they do not easily fit into a particular scientific journal. Following an initial screening by Bulletin staff, these papers are peer
reviewed. The final publication decision is made by the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin.

The Society also publishes a broad spectrum of scientific and technical books; some are historical in nature and others are contributed volumes arising from workshops and conferences. In addition, the AMS has published a glossary, several encyclopedic works, a series of bibliographies, and translations. Unlike the volumes in the Meteorological Monograph and Historical Monograph series, these books typically do not include refereed papers, even though they are written by specialists in the field.

A third broad category of printed/typeset material consists of preprints of papers to be presented at scientific conferences sponsored or cosponsored by the AMS. These preprint volumes have been issued since 1951 and contain non–peer reviewed and usually abbreviated manuscripts. The requirements for each preprint volume vary, but the usual procedure is that each author with a paper accepted for a particular conference will receive from AMS Headquarters a set of instructions for preparing the paper for the volume, which must be submitted in camera-ready form. Deadlines for receipt of the manuscripts are included in the instructions sent to the authors and are announced in the Bulletin. Preprint volumes or CDROMs, if produced, are available at the meeting for which they were prepared and can also be purchased directly from AMS Headquarters after the meeting has taken place. In addition, the AMS now has the capability to make digital recordings of the visual presentation material and accompanying oral presentation for meeting talks, and this material along with the extended abstracts can be made available on the Internet in addition to or in place of the traditional preprint volumes.

From 1993 through 2007, the contents of the year’s preprint volumes are collected into a CD-ROM product—allowing easy access to this information for researchers. Beginning in 2008, the preprints are distributed only through the Internet, allowing easy accessibility, reduced conference fees, and a later deadline for submission.

Meteorological Abstracts and Bibliography, later renamed Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, was conceived of by the Society and began publication in 1950. This journal, which appears monthly in print and quarterly in CD-ROM format and is also available over the Internet, consists of abstracts of scientific and technical papers, books, and reports, derived from the major meteorological and oceanographic publications produced worldwide.

Last, AMS Headquarters issues miscellaneous publications in print or online, such as educational and career guidance brochures, a college curriculum guide, informational leaflets, and advertising fliers and catalogs. Two online publications of special note are the AMS Update (and its predecessor, the AMS Newsletter), which provides timely information on government and other activities relating to the Society’s fields of interest, and the Employment Announcements, which list a variety of career openings.