This article describes the linguistic and semantic features of technocratic discourse using a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. The article goes further to assert that the function of technocratic discourse in public policy is to advocate and promulgate a highly contentious political and economic agenda under the guise of scientific objectivity and political impartiality. We provide strong evidence to support the linguistic description, and the claims of political advocacy, by analyzing a 900-word document about globalization produced by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

Although studies of actual communication practices in the workplace are now commonplace, few historical studies in this area have been completed. Such historical studies are necessary to help researchers understand the often complicated origins of genre conventions in professional discourse. Historical research that draws on contemporary genre theory helps address this void. A genre perspective is particularly valuable for helping researchers trace a given type of document's emergence and evolution. This perspective also provides a way of accounting for the connections between communicative practices and the other activities that occupy the attention of workplace organizations. To illustrate what this perspective brings to historical research in professional communication, I examine the development of communicative practices at a national production company that relied on texts to mediate its organizational activities across geographically dispersed locations.

Ethics as a topic in technical communication has grown in interest in the past quarter century as the field itself has matured. We now understand technical communication as involved in communicating not only technical information but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals. It also is involved in accommodating the values and ethics of its many audiences. This understanding is linked to an awareness of the social nature of all discourse and the root interconnectedness of rhetoric and ethics. This article presents an introduction and annotated bibliography of articles from technical writing and communication journals over this period, arranged in categories of professional, academic, and systematic approaches. Ethics is broadly conceived to include not only particular theories but also systems of values and principles.

English technical writing clearly emerged during the Renaissance and the first decades of printing, but during the 1641–1700 period technical writing gained credibility and prestige. It was a valued tool for achieving the utilitarian ends of an age in which practical goals were valued more than aesthetic ones. Technical writing can be found in a range of disciplines, such as agriculture, medicine, science, as well as the major English trades and crafts. As a valued form of discourse, it illuminates the world of work in seventeenth-century England and the problems faced by the early experimenters of the Royal Society who sought to use science to solve major human, military, and economic problems while seeking to expand understanding of nature. Studying technical writing of this period allows us to track the continued development of technical writing as a distinct form of discourse.

In the workplace setting professionals use language to create boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, using the discourses of their professions and of specific workplace domain. Some boundaries are marked by formal tests—directed memos, posted notices, stamps that read “For Your Eyes Only.” Less overt forms, and arguably more effective, are specific rhetorical devices relying on knowledge of the corporate and professional culture. People are included or excluded from such cultures by their knowledge and ability to manipulate professional fables and folklore, historical data, workplace experience narratives, and practical knowledge. These discourse practices can be used to promote solidarity and positively strengthen professional cultures, but they can also be used to obstruct communication and to create social fragmentation in the workplace. This article examines some examples of discourse practices among managers and employees in the customer service department of a large manufacturing firm, and shows how knowledge of the ways that language can both include and exclude people from cultural groups in the worksite can help professional communicators facilitate more effective and responsible communication practices in workplace settings.

The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

Noting that recent research in workplace writing tends toward description of contexts for writing, this study turns its attention to text itself, focusing on the nominal expressions in the discourse on management. Analysis shows that these nominals recursively delete not only agent roles but also those of experiencer, object, and goal, and at the same time conflate the interests of researchers and managers. Calling on pragmatic theories of politeness, Giddens' characterization of bureaucracy as reflexive system, and Foucault's concept of “governmentality,” this study suggests that management nominals are a particularly intense expression of modernity itself.

In 1994, the Chicago Tribune announced in a blaring page-one story that fraud had been discovered in an important nine-year-old medical study which compared two treatments for early-stage breast cancer. The study had assured women that lumpectomy plus radiation was as safe as the more invasive mastectomy procedure for early-stage breast cancer; however, the revelation of fraud called these results into question. We examine the reactions of two professional medical journals to demonstrate how negotiations for upholding ethical norms in science took place within the pages of these publications. Then, we analyze the public discourse surrounding the fraud and show that much of the coverage was devoted to scandal. Both forums missed opportunities: professional journals ignored a chance to explore the blurry boundary between “writing up” and “making up” results that all scientists must negotiate in interpreting and publicizing data, while public discourse neglected women affected by the fraud.

Drawing upon eleven volumes of articles published between 1890 and 1990 in The Auk, journal of American ornithology, this study shows the path to professionalization through four phases of ornithological discourse history. In the science of ornithology, the interests of conservationists, science students, and scientists themselves were originally served by a single discourse form—the personal narrative of natural history. But, with professionalization, scientists increasingly associated such narratives with amateur performance. The resulting gap between professional science and public understanding of science was reinforced by the establishment of a university program of study in ornithology, by an emerging sense of a scientific community, and by the forces of environmentalism.

Participants in a qualitative case study of nonacademic R&D authors were uncomfortable with the idea of persuasion in their writing. The participants thought their reports were more informative than persuasive. Three definitions for “persuasion” emerged: discourse intended to push a reader toward an action; discourse written in a clear, compelling style; and shady, manipulative discourse. When asked whether they owed a greater debt to their audience or to their subject matter, most participants chose subject matter. However, some participants argued that my question posed a false dichotomy, in that serving subject matter was the best way to serve audience.

The problems in technical communications are related more to logical structure than to language. Structure problems occur at document, section, paragraph, and sentence levels. Editing is most effective if it deals with structure first. Structure deficiencies can be detected by applying a range of logical analysis criteria to each text part: looking at the nature and quality of its content and the use of the appropriate discourse sequence. The nature of the content determines where the text part belongs in the section or elsewhere in the document structure. Sufficient definition eliminates vagueness. The correct discourse sequence determines the internal structure of the text part. Lists, headings, classifications, and organograms must comply with the laws of categorization and relevant logical criteria, including some arrived at by lateral thinking.

Research and writing often begin with a play of determinacy and indeterminacy, or “in-determinacy” Do. Other disciplinary levels include invention and presuppositions D1, formal findings D2, and technical and media products D3. This rhetorical approach leads, here, to identifying levels and relationships; tracing cross-disciplinary information and dominant influences; applying the results to specific cases in science, literary criticism, ethics, and technical writing; thus, suggesting a typology for furthering such dialogue.

Examining the history of science from the perspective of metaphor suggests that there are few differences between the literal and the metaphorical in scientific discourse. The central role of metaphors in science seems to ensure that science is open-ended, suggesting that conceptions of reality will always be open to change and interpretation.

This article examines the frequency and discourse functions of 752 active transitive clauses in a 66,500-word corpus of sixteen research articles in the physical sciences. The overall rate of actives was only 34 percent; the rates were lowest in the Methods (12%) and Abstracts (27%), higher in Introductions (41%) and Results (40%), and highest in Discussions (44%) and Conclusions (52%). The active was often required because of the principle of end-weight. Throughout the research article actives with “real world” grammatical subjects were used to state “scientific truths.” The most prominent other functions tended to vary from section to section and to correlate somewhat with the semantic subcategory of the grammatical subject. Active clauses with human subjects were used to cite research and to introduce metadiscourse, while ones with discourse subjects were used to introduce graphics, and ones with research process subjects and research product subjects were used to make evidential statements about results.

The customary approach to classifying multiple audiences for written discourse is to recognize primary, secondary, and immediate audiences, and, in some cases, gatekeeping audiences. Based on findings from an ethnographic case study of engineering authors in an R&D setting, this article suggests that authors should also attend to watchdog audiences as they write. A watchdog audience pays close attention to the written transaction between the author and the primary audience. Authors must direct their discourse toward the primary audience, but they must also keep the motives and purposes of the watchdog audience in mind as they write and revise. The watchdog audience in my case study, while it had no direct leverage or other organizational power over the authors, still influenced the authors extensively as they revised their text. Evidence indicates that, beyond the apparent and traditional sources of power, there are more contextual, hidden, socially mediated power relationships equally capable of shaping written discourse.

Identifying problems in recent technical communication studies of historical medical text, this article suggests ways for researchers to overcome them. Its approach uses five steps for conducting sound historical research: establishing originality for historical textual analysis; adopting an authoritative text for analysis; understanding the genre or form of a historical text; understanding the intellectual or social context for a historical text; and understanding the publishing and readership context of a historical text. These steps are discussed within the context of related fields of inquiry, namely history of medicine, history of the book, literary criticism and historical linguistics, and analytical bibliography. The article concludes by exploring new directions for research in technical communication and history of medicine.

Current treatment of teaching transitions relies on an approach which presents students with lists of transitions to insert at unspecified places in the text. In addition, some textbooks and composition handbooks advise students to be “subtle” and warn against explicitly stating their purpose. This advice exists in spite of the fact that many professional writers are often explicit about the effect they intend in writing their transitions. Since handbook authors have failed to offer a general theory of how to write effective transitions, I propose that speech act theory can explain the function of transitions in terms of the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of explicit performatives. An analysis of various samples shows that published writers regularly use explicit performatives in scientific, business, technical and academic writing. This analysis offers specific implications for improving handbook explanations and for instructing student writers in writing effective transitions by determining the illocutionary force of the specific speech act underlying each transitional device.

It has been shown that the language of some scientific disciplines is highly metaphorical, but there is probably no field that uses metaphor quite as pervasively and idiosyncratically as does computer science. One senses that this phenomenon results from a need to compensate for the exceedingly abstract nature of the discipline. The central metaphors do not exist singly. They exist in groups or families, suggesting a deep influence on the way people in computer science write and talk. Such a cluster of deep metaphors can be thought of as a paradigm of the discipline, a set of eyeglasses through which we see our world. This article examines some essential paradigms of computer science. These paradigms are so much a part of the way we think about and talk about computers that it is difficult to imagine computer discourse without them.

Based on a 70,000-word sample of eight journal articles and four textbook chapters, this article examines the communicative value of anticipatory- it clauses in scientific and technical texts. The main discourse function of the 205 clauses appears to be to provide author comment, with the meaning of the verb or the meaning of the adjective determining the particular type of comment. Many of these comments are evidential; that is, they are concerned primarily with the reliability or source of knowledge. Anticipatory- it clauses are also used to mark the introduction of a topic, to forecast, to summarize, and to direct the reader in interpreting a graphic or recognizing the most salient points in an argument. Rather than being a structure to avoid, the anticipatory- it clause is probably one whose effective use indicates academic acculturation.

Students usually compose adequate descriptive abstracts, but many confuse summary abstracts with short paraphrases or descriptive abstracts. Textbooks define a summary abstract ambiguously, as a “mini-paper” and/or as a mere statement of an article's topic and conclusions; most textbooks maintain the conceptual distinction between summary and descriptive abstracts even though differences between the two types are blurred in practice. These irregularities are accounted for by a hypothesis: in all levels of discourse, from sentences to extended texts, general and specific components conserve the “shape” of information. Intermediate discourse components (e.g., sentential tense, the syllogistic middle term, or the body of a text) may be deleted to create a smaller equivalent discourse structure. The two polar abstract types represent polar (general vs. specific) text components. Common abstracting errors arise from two sources: failure to distinguish between an abstract as “mini-paper” and a short paraphrase from the body of a long text, but also failure to distinguish between general topical information and the specific claims of a text, attributed to students' usual lack of acquaintance with other literature on a topic, besides the article they attempt to abstract.

Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

Riley has recently applied some speech act strategies of indirectness to textbook instructions on being both clear and polite in professional letter writing. Based on results from two experiments with college senior students, the present project aims to account for those strategies and to discuss four principles generated from the experimental data about each strategy: 1) its value index, 2) its writer/addressee orientation, 3) its linguistic characterization, and 4) its location in a sentence. The professional writer can achieve the desired degree of indirectness by consulting those four features about any strategy used in any context.

Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.

This article first reviews the role of oral and written discourse within social constructionist theory. The author discusses both the differences and the similarities between oral and written discourse and suggests that writers emphasize the similarities rather than the differences since the implicit rules of conversation have much to offer to the technical writer. In order to apply these conversational principles, however, technical writers need to alter their attitudes toward their audiences. The article concludes with an example of how the principles of conversation can be applied to the process of writing instructions.

Recent studies indicate that scientific research is part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. This article argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown of the scientific community and invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, scientific research cannot be part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. Researchers should be aware that inventional heuristics introduced in freshman composition courses, which serve to discover ideas within existing knowledge, are not always applicable in real-life situations where scientific writing occurs, because the content of discourse is sometimes given in these situations.

Because of the recent emphasis on rhetorical context in business and technical writing (BTW) instruction, the problem-solving case has become a staple in BTW classrooms. However, a number of critics have voiced concerns about the use of the rhetorical case. These concerns recall an ancient debate among Roman rhetoricians over an early case-study method called declamation. For contemporary theorists, the debate over case study revolves around its value as a stimulant to problem-solving skills, its ability to imitate the realistic circumstances of professional BTW, and its emphasis on persona and audience along with its deemphasis of the teacher. A full spectrum of arguments on these and other issues in the case-study debate indicates that the discipline is entering a new phase in its deliberations over the role of problem-solving and pragmatics in the BTW classroom.

A qualitative study using reading protocols suggests that when readers of informative documents understand conveyed information satisfactorily, they make direct confirmations and positive comprehension evaluations. When readers are uncertain about the accuracy of their understanding, they guess, make assumptions, or render the text's language into their own words. When readers' understanding is impaired, they ask for more clearly established links or relationships in the text, or they pinpoint some ambiguity or lack of resolution. When readers' understanding is unsatisfactory but not impaired, they request additional information. In addition, readers make evaluative suggestions that introduce, focus, emphasize, or reiterate their other comprehension-related responses. The response patterns isolated in this qualitative study indicate the need for specific quantitative research and suggest some directions for developing reader-based heuristics for informative writing.

Common technical graphics terms table, graph, chart, and diagram share a parallel logical structure with the four common types of technical graphics that the terms typically refer to. In the system of terminology as in the system of graphics types, four logical categories result from the possible permutations of two features. The abstract semantic features which underlie the meanings of the terms are in this discussion labeled as [UNITS] and [PROPERTIES]; likewise the significant features which distinguish the graphics types are here labeled as “units” and “properties.” These proposed semantic features reflect a fundamental semantic relation common to all meaningful statements, the attribution of a property (a predicate) to an object (a subject). The connection between term-features ([UNITS] and [PROPERTIES]) and type-features (“units” and “properties”) is a variable but systematic sense-reference relation. Consequently the terminology used to refer to the various graphics types varies systematically according to the markedness relationships among the terms. Principled explanations of the best uses for each graphics type follow from the proposed logical relations between them.

Theoretical studies in scientific and technical communication have begun to explore what they call discourse communities in the sciences and engineering on grounds that these communities provide the norms and practices for communication in these fields. The theoretical literature on which these studies are based develops two views of what a discourse community might be, an institutional and a social view. The first of these views has been the more influential, but both views may and should be brought to the study and the pedagogy of scientific and technical communication.

Amplification is the set of rhetorical techniques by which a discourse is elaborated and extended to enhance its appeal and information value. Even in the manual, long considered the most laconic of the genres of technical communication, amplification has its place. Drawing on the theory of classical and modern rhetoric, this article shows how amplification tends to increase and improve the coverage, rationale, warnings, behavioral alternatives, examples, previews, reviews, and general emphasis of technical manuals.

A review of the current literature suggests that the concept of purpose has not received sufficient theoretical or pedagogical attention. In this article, theoretical depth is provided by a discussion of four components of purpose: purpose as associated with discourse types, purpose from the writer's viewpoint, purpose as it relates to situation, and purpose from the reader's viewpoint. Research is cited, and examples from computer documentation are used to illustrate each component. Cooperation and conflict among components are examined in a sample document, and classroom applications are discussed.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

Two parallels between scientific and literary discourse are the aesthetic appeal they both make and their shared use of metaphor. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould on the science of form demonstrate these parallels. In one, Gould acts as a reader of scientific discourse, in the other as a writer. In both essays, Gould demonstrates the imaginative qualities science and literature share.

The current job market favors young technical writers who are skilled in the way of the computer both as a subject of writing and as a production tool. In the technical writing classroom students can be exposed to this important technology through assignments that include computerized instruction, word processing, text analysis, artificial intelligence, and communications.

Stylistic analysis of scientific and technical prose reveals that technical and non-technical expository prose share a number of common characteristics; consequently, common assumptions about a clear stylistic separation between scientific and literary writing are faulty. Technical prose, moreover, possesses a number of rhetorical features which further increase its likeness to literary writing. Both style and rhetoric of technical writing thus point toward non-referential functions in scientific discourse, including the operation of significant cultural codes.

Metaphor is best conceived not as a textual feature, but as a product of readers responding to texts. In technical discourse, metaphors help readers perform certain physical and mental operations. The technical metaphor can be classified by how it specifically helps readers perform these tasks, that is, by its purpose and method. The technical metaphor can 1) name parts, stressing space; 2) denote actions, stressing time; 3) denote qualities, stressing neither time nor space; or 4) create models, stressing both time and space.

Though historical scholarship in technical writing has been sparse, what is available on Francis Bacon has tended to focus on Bacon's influence in directing scientific discourse toward the use of plain prose. This article shows that in many ways, Bacon's theory of rhetoric for specialized, knowledge-seeking fields directly conflicts with that of those who support plain prose for these fields. In addition, the rhetorical method Bacon utilized in presenting the theory has subverted the effect of much of his theory. Consequently, it is not surprising that Bacon's actual theory differs both from what was transferred to the Royal Society and from posterity's interpretation of it.

With the rise of science, 18th-century logic and rhetoric began to make use of inductive patterns of discourse. In logic, William Duncan discussed two methods of organizing extended discourse, the methods of analysis and synthesis. Analysis represents the movement of thought as the thinker or writer works through a problem to discover its solution. This method is actually an early form of what is now known as problem solving that Joseph Priestley, a rhetorician as well as a scientist, introduced into rhetoric. He uses analysis in his scientific writing, especially in his Experiments on Different Kinds of Air, in the form of a five-stage mental operation or heuristic that records the progress of his thoughts as he experimented on air to isolate and identify oxygen.

L'analyse de seize ecrits en provenance de l'industrie et seize en provenance de la recherche met en evidence le haut niveau d'abstration des bons documents techniques

Much has been written on and about technical communication. Most of this writing focuses on specific advice for practitioners (e.g., how to write better, typographical guidelines, proposed standards, how to produce more effective manuals, and the like). Also, considerable literature deals with the field theoretically. Often, this second category of literature is difficult to find because so much is buried under the welter of pragmatically oriented material and is interwoven with literature from related fields. Assemblage of this hard-to-find material reveals that within the context of the considerably broader area of human communication, generally technical communication occupies a unique position. Schematic models of related human communication disciplines are used to construct an overall theoretical model which locates this specialized niche occupied by technical communication. Contributions to the overall model come from such areas as empirical social research, general semantics, learning theory, and modern rhetoric. The overall model represents an attempt to provide a catalogue of perspectives from which technical communication might be studied profitably. It also is intended to provide a useful guide to specific actions in various pragmatic and occupational technical communication situations.

Tables and figures arc an integral part of the medium of communication of science and technology. An analysis of tables and figures, relying heavily on Euclidean terms (point, line and plane) explains something of their power–their ability to display with clarity large amounts of data, complex data relationships, and intricate three-dimensional configurations. Analysis also clarifies the mutual dependence of tables and figures and their accompanying texts. Additionally, analysis makes clear the semantic gap between tables and graphs, on the one hand, and illustrations, on the other. All are equally vital strategies in scientific and technical discourse. However, tables and graphs are paralinguistic extensions of scientific and technical dialects; illustrations, on the other hand, are a nonlinguistic supplement to these dialects. Finally, analysis provides clues for the teaching of proper graphic choice, good graphic ‘grammar,’ and the appropriate contextualization of graphs.

To determine how certain cohesion elements - the given-new contract, pronouns, synonyms, and topic sentences – affect the readability of technical paragraphs, six alternative paragraphs were composed, two “models” and four others carefully varied to feature the four factors under consideration. Then each passage was tested for its readability when subjects were administered a cloze procedure and a recall exercise for each paragraph. The results show that violations of the given-new contract make technical paragraphs more difficult to read; that changing repeated words to pronouns makes passages more difficult to follow; that using synonyms (instead of repetitions) makes prose harder to read; and that deleting a topic sentence may impede a reader's comprehension. Writing teachers, then, might consider these results when they direct students in the production of connected discourse. And researchers might use this methodology to investigate other influences on the readability of connected discourse.

Language study and literary criticism have for many years been separated. Modern developments in critical theory have stressed the study of texts. Structuralism developed a semiotic approach to texts using psychological and linguistic theory to support objective analysis. Poststructuralist theory has further developed these approaches investigating deep and surface significance in textual interpretation urging a deconstruction of texts to yield a full contemporary understanding. The relationship between writer, reader, text, and context is seen anew within the whole communication complex in an approach which regards texts as discourse. Advanced foreign language teaching unites literature and language in a new synthesis stressing communication and conceptualization through language. Technical communication should be aware of new interdisciplinary trends since it is itself at the center of the dominant theme of communication.

Requirements of accuracy in technical writing overwhelm considerations of stylistic grace. Analysis of the resulting technical style, however, often reveals a discrepancy between technical and verbal accuracy. The object of verbal form is an accommodation between grace and accuracy. Several avenues to achieve this accommodation are presented from Martin Buber's I and Thou to psycholinguist theorists such as George Miller and Walter Kintsch. Linguistic theory and literacy analysis can also provide means of reestablishing grace, not as replacement, but in contention with technical accuracy. The aims of technical discourse, like that of all other discourse, should include the gracefulness of one human being speaking to another.

This article is placed within the defined area of study of “coherence,” which is seen as one of the three parts of recent work in the “discourse analysis” of contemporary English prose with emphasis on technical writing. One element of the total system of coherence is seen to be the “associated nominal” which, together with repetition, substitution, deletion, synonymy, among others, enables writers to maintain the thread of continuity in a text. Introductory details of associated nominals are given, and some of their purposes and environments of use are described with the use of examples of actual English use. Potential effects of this work on the teaching of technical writing are mentioned, and detailed references and anannotated bibliography assist readers who may wish to read further.

Because of doubts about the status of paragraphs after World War II and the influence of readability formulas which emphasize sentence length and word length, technical writing teachers and texts have not been concerned very much with stylistic matters, especially at the paragraph level. However, recent research advances in the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and readability all redirect our attention to matters beyond the sentence in technical writing. A familiarity with such advances—including an understanding of cohesion elements, the “given-new contract,” and tagmemics—can enable technical writing instructors to improve student writing.

Kinneavy's theory of discourse and Mathes' concept of contextual editing can be effectively applied to teaching classification in technical writing. My procedure, in the nine steps described here, provides students with an understanding of classification as an analytical and generative tool. Its usefulness in analysis is discovered through a structural study of Mumford's “Machines, Utilities, and ‘The Machine‘”; an awareness of Mumford's classificatory structure helps students understand his essay. Students see for themselves, by organizing facts into paragraphs, the generative power of contextual editing applied to classification; the same kind of structuring Mumford uses can be used in their own writing. This generative application simulates the research-to-writing process and dramatically increases the coherence and clarity of much student writing.