This study examined developmental differences in adolescents' and adults' use of rhetorical strategies in memos written during a role-play session. Ninth graders, twelfth graders, college juniors, and adult graduate students chose 1 of 11 roles within the context of the role-play situation and exchanged memos persuading each other to adopt a position regarding a policy for off-campus lunch privileges. Five memos written by each of 11 randomly selected participants at each grade level were categorized by t-unit on the basis of a system of 17 rhetorical strategies. Analyses determined the relationship between grade level and memo length, rhetorical strategies (in each of four initial t-units), rhetorical focus, and participants' perceptions of their audiences' “power” before and after the session. Results show that college students and adults were more likely than younger participants to focus their memos on presenting their roles and establishing a relationship with their audience. The memos of younger participants were more likely to use “assertive” or “conditional” rhetorical strategies. Across all grade levels, however, writers were more likely to focus initial memos on establishing relationships and later memos on articulating their positions.

This study is a phenomenological reading, or documentary account, of one child's early experiences as a writer. Through narrative, explication, and argument, I attempt to analyze Samantha's activity as a writer within a fuller portrayal of her as a person, by embedding her early literacy practices within the broader context of her expressive needs, social interactions and interests, and learning patterns in both formal and informal settings.

We depend on language not only to write but also to conceptualize and communicate about composing. The various kinds of discourse about writing processes reveal the assumptions and values about writing held by students, researchers, and professional writers. This article discusses some metaphors used by professional writers when describing their revising activities to interviewers and suggests the implications of their use for research on writing.

Explaining difficult concepts to lay readers is an important discursive goal, and yet frequently the quality of explanatory writing is poor. One reason for this poor quality is that the discursive form itself is not well understood. Some studies have identified textual features of effective explanations; however, theoretical characterizations of explanatory discourse are either unnecessarily narrow or overly general. Consequently, this essay offers a new theory of explanatory discourse that is intended to guide analyses of and stimulate improvements in explanations designed for mass audiences. The theory defines explanatory discourse in terms of a particular goal; promoting understanding for lay readers of some phenomenon. This goal is distinguished from those of promoting awareness of new information, proving a claim, or encouraging agreement with a claim. The utility of the theory is demonstrated by showing how it (1) identifies those research literatures most relevant to improving the quality of written explanations, (2) organizes existing findings on explanatory effectiveness in a way that resolves controversies in the literature, and (3) suggests principles for pedagogy pertaining to explanatory writing.

Cognitive social psychologists have examined the characteristics of information that make it likely to be incorporated into processes of memory, judgment, decision making, and inference. The “vividness” of information is the degree to which it is emotionally engaging, concrete, imagery producing and proximate. Vivid information is most likely to be used in these cognitive processes and also seems to satisfy most requirements for newsworthiness. Journalism practice systematically selects for vivid information, and journalism writing enhances or creates such vividness. It can be argued, however, that vivid information may not be the best information for use in decision making and inference drawing and that overreliance on it can lead to errors of perception and judgment. An example is the colorful but irrelevant personal anecdote. Journalism may select only what is vivid—concrete and personal events, conflict, sensation, and “bad news”—rather than what is truly informative, thereby institutionalizing errors of perception and inference in newswork.

This article surveys and analyzes the contemporary reception of Plato's rhetorical theory in contemporary rhetoric and composition studies by examining the response from three current perspectives: (1) presenting Plato as completely against rhetoric; (2) leaving Plato out of rhetoric altogether; and (3) interpreting Plato's work as raising issues central to classical and contemporary rhetoric. The discussion of the first two responses to Plato's relationship to rhetoric reveals a reductive, or formulaic, presentation of classical rhetoric. The discussion of the third perspective shows that it is the most accurate interpretation. Plato's rhetoric is related to the traditional five canons that were prominent in Greek rhetoric and explicitly systematized in Roman rhetoric, beginning with the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. If Plato's extensive contribution to the last two of the classical canons of rhetoric, memory and delivery, were more commonly included in the historicizing of rhetoric, then the five canons would work in the fullness of their interaction, rather than as the three-part system (invention, arrangement, and style) that dominates much current interpretation of classical rhetoric. Examples of reintegration of Plato into classical rhetoric (the third perspective) leads to a conclusion that Plato's rhetoric is central to contemporary interpretations of classical rhetoric.

This article draws upon data collected in a five-month study of primary grade writers to illustrate dimensions of variation in how young children orchestrate or manage the complex writing process. The observed children, all members of an integrated urban public school classroom, varied in the degree to which they focused on the diverse message forming and encoding demands of the writing activity and in when they maintained that focus. These differences may have existed, in part, because of differences in how the children made use of the available sources of support for their composing; that is, they differed in the degree to which other symbolic media (pictures and talk) and other children shaped their individual writing efforts. The children's composing behaviors were consistent with their apparent intentions and with their styles as symbolizers and socializers in their classroom. Viewing differences in children's ways of composing from the perspective of linear or uniform conceptions of writing growth may mask the holistic sense of each child's behavior.

Donald Graves has achieved wide recognition for propounding a method for teaching elementary students how to write that stresses unstructured expression of personal experiences. He uses his case study of sixteen New Hampshire children as a research base providing proof of the efficacy of this method. However, his observations from this study qualify as reportage more than research. The work of the Graves team in New Hampshire represents a demonstration of teaching ideas that work well under favorable circumstances. Because he never considers negative evidence for the hypotheses he is testing, his work does not constitute research.

This article discusses one student's persistence in misunderstanding her teacher's written comments on her papers, even when these comments are accompanied by other response channels that serve, in part, to clarify the written comments. It presents the idea that student and teacher each bring to the written response episode a set of information, skills, and values that may or may not be shared between them, and it is the interplay of these three elements that feeds the student's reading and processing of teacher written comments and that leads to misunderstandings. This happened even for a high-achieving student in an otherwise successful classroom. An in-depth look at one student and the classroom context in which she learns to write, focusing on her grappling with her teacher's written comments, reveals the complexity of the teaching-learning process in the high school writing class.

The development of technical manuals requires coordination of the expertise in the subject area and in writing and design skills as well as detailed knowledge of the audience and job context. In this research we examined the production process of five publication houses in an attempt to determine how or if these requirements for expertise are being met. A further goal was to determine what strategies in the production process may facilitate or detract from the production of effective documentation. Writers, managers, and illustrators were interviewed at each site. The work flow in developing a manual is described. Data on the use of specifications and guidelines, the revision process including quality control, validation and verification, are presented. The skills and duties of writers, illustrators, and government representatives are presented. Finally, the production process for technical manuals is interpreted in terms of a process model of writing and strategies for improving the quality of documentation is discussed.

This essay is an extension of recent research on nonacademic writing and represents an initial effort to explore the contexts for the letters citizens send their legislators. It focuses on only one aspect of this writing—its value. Most of the information in the essay comes from interviews with the author's state and national legislators and/or their staff. This essay suggests why the letters about political issues and personal concerns that citizens send their legislators are of great value to both the writer and the reader, and why the relationship between citizens and their public officials as writers and readers may deserve more intensive exploration.

Matched-pair samples (N= 174) of women and men faculty at doctoral-level universities and at traditionally women's colleges responded to a questionnaire in ways indicating (a) that at universities or colleges, women equal their male colleagues' time investments in writing and males' rates of publishing journal articles; (b) that at women's colleges, men and women devoted about half as much time to writing, devote about twice as much time to teaching, and publish articles at half the rate of their university counterparts; (c) and that, in either setting, women experience more discomfort about pressures to publish, feel more adversely affected by harsh reviewers, and report less confidence with their writing than do men, especially men at universities.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the covert linguistic behavior of two groups of subjects, one classified as above-average users of language, the other as below-average users. It was hypothesized that the remedial group would manifest higher levels of subvocal motor activity than the above-average group during stimulated tasks, but that during pausing episodes that occur during writing the remedial group would manifest lower levels of subvocal activity than its counterpart. During each task, covert linguistic behavior was measured continuously by three electromyographs and was analyzed to determine physiological changes. The results confirm the hypotheses and suggest a lower level of cognitive activity on the part of the remedial group. Given that pausing episodes have come to be recognized as important periods of discourse planning, failure to utilize pauses for planning might account for qualitative differences in the writing of the two groups.

This article examines the relationship between current concepts of the reading process and contemporary theories of literary response. It is argued that text-based concepts of the reading process are highly isomorphic with the New Criticism that dominated literary theory from the 1930s to the 1960s, and that reader-based concepts of the reading process are equally isomorphic with the “reader-response” theories of literary understanding that have succeeded the New Criticism. It is maintained that the interactive formulation of the reading process that evolved from the conflict between text-based and reader-based formulations has been ignored by literary theorists to the detriment of developing literary theories that reflect the psychological reality of processing literary texts.

Preparing a written outline during prewriting and composing a rough rather than a polished first draft are cognitive strategies that may lessen a writer's work load. The present laboratory and field research examined whether these strategies enhance writing performance. In an experiment, I manipulated the use of these strategies by college students in a letter writing task. The students' writing process, efficiency, and quality were examined. The results showed that preparing a written outline, compared with not doing so, increased the time spent translating ideas into text, improved the quality of letters, and failed to enhance overall efficiency. The use of rough versus polished drafts affected when the students reviewed their work, as expected, but had no influence on quality or efficiency. A survey of science and engineering faculty revealed that the frequency of using written outlines correlated positively with writing productivity, whereas use of polished drafts was uncorrelated with productivity.

This study examined three recent language arts textbook programs to determine the frequency of writing activities, the nature of writing tasks, and the frequency of process-approach activities such as selecting topics, prewriting, sharing, revising, and publishing. Results indicate that elementary school students receive in the central part of the lessons in their language arts textbooks opportunities to write an averange of approximately one piece of extended writing per week. Typically, the topic of the piece is selected by the text rather than the student; there is no prewriting activity; the piece is not shared with a teacher or peers; revision, which is seldom suggested, focuses on editing surface features, not content; and students' products are not published. Recommendations for improvements in writing activities are considered.

This article identifies context variables in written composition from theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It also shows how multiple views of context from across the disciplines can build toward a broader definition of writing. The article is divided into two sections. First is a discussion of different perspectives and definitions of context from across three disciplines. Second is a proposal for considering complimentary views of context as a framework for studying young children's language and literacy development. Multidiscipline perspectives of context can provide new directions for writing research and can lead to a richer, fuller view of writing as thinking, as language, as a social event, and as a reflection of culture.

Two studies investigated the editing strategies used by college basic writing (BW) students as they went about correcting sentence-level errors in controlled editing tasks. One study involved simple word processing, and a second involved an interactive editor that supplemented the word-processing program, giving students feedback on their correction attempts and helping them focus on the errors. In both studies BW students showed two clearly different editing strategies, a consulting strategy in which grammatical rules were consulted and an intuiting strategy in which the sound of the text was assessed for “goodness” in a rather naturalistic way. Students consistently used their intuiting strategies more effectively; however, errors requiring consulting strategies showed a larger improvement after intervention by the interactive editor. Cognitive implications of the editing strategies are discussed in terms of the requisite knowledge involved in successful application of each strategy.

R. M. Gagné's distinction between lateral and vertical transfer can be elaborated for written composition: (a) the lateral transfer of mechanical and formal skills and (b) the vertical transfer of higher-order knowledge in the domain of rhetoric and writing. Vertical transfer of writing skills is situational: a function of the context and content of a specific rhetorical situation. Success in a situational writing task depends on two types of domain-specific knowledge being operational: (a) knowledge of the specific content of the subject matter and (b) knowledge of the domain of rhetoric and writing. The theory of lateral and vertical transfer as applied to writing is compatible with current conceptions of declarative and procedural cognitive processes and with a balanced pedagogy of both student-centered and direct, content-oriented instruction. Two appendixes present practical procedures based on transfer theory for improving general program goals and classroom instruction of writing.

Introductions to research articles (RAs) have become an important site for the analysis of academic writing. However, analysts have apparently not considered whether RA introductions typically include statements of principal findings. In contrast, this issue is often addressed in the manuals and style guides surveyed, most advocating the desirability of announcing principal findings (APFs) in RA introductions. Therefore, a study of actual practice in two leading journals from two different fields (physics and educational psychology) was undertaken. In the Physical Review 45% of the introductions sampled contained APFs (with some increase in percentage over the last 40 years), while in the Journal of Educational Psychology the percentage fell to under 7%. These figures are at variance with the general trend of recommendations in primary and secondary sources. Thus preliminary evidence points to (a) a mismatch between descriptive practice and prescriptive advice and (b) diversity in this rhetorical feature between the two fields.

Recent research suggests that if we overlook topic knowledge we may ignore an important source of students' writing problems. Given that writers' topic knowledge affects how and what they compose, this article presents a systematic strategy for examining topic-related knowledge prior to writing. Included in the discussion is a theory-based rationale for the measure, a formalized method for analyzing topic knowledge, and a guide for using the instrument.

This study examines topic sentences in the academic article context—specifically in articles by professors in biochemistry, civil engineering, history, literature, physics, psychology, and sociology. By using propositional analysis and adapting procedures originally devised by Braddock, the investigation centers on (1) percentage of minor topic sentences, (2) combined percentage of minor and major topic sentences, and (3) percentage of topic sentence “influence.” These three indices show how heavily writers in the corpus rely on topic sentences, although there are variations across disciplines. These variations may be attributed to paragraph length, whole-text structure, or even conventional preferences. However, even when they do not use topic sentences, writers in some disciplines use topic sentence-like features (headings) for the same purposes. Conjecture is that special content and coherence demands make topic sentences a standard feature in academic articles.

This study examines the relationship between two measures of individual differences in social cognition and the quality of eleventh grade students' persuasive writing. Subjects completed Crockett's Role Category Questionnaire, and wrote a persuasive letter in response to the problem, “Smoking and the School Nurse.” Letters were submitted to judges for impressionistic and attributional ratings. A content-analytic measure was applied to these 40 papers to yield a measure of the number and quality of persuasive strategies employed. Finally, the same papers were submitted to a second panel, who rated them for overall persuasiveness and appropriateness of tone. Results indicated a significant relationship between interpersonal cognitive complexity and abstractness and quality of writing, persuasiveness, appropriateness of tone, and level of persuasive strategy employed.

This essay examines narrative choices in experimental (interpretive) and traditional (analytical) ethnographies. The material covered includes probability in quantitative and qualitative research; ethnographic narratives as ways of knowing and telling about the world; perspective as a consequence of both narrative stance and narrative voice; and the economics of producing interpretations and analyses in academic prose. Underlying the argument is the assumption that decisions ethnographers make about what to tell and how to tell it are influenced by to whom they plan to tell it and under what circumstances. Hence the ethnographer's narrative dilemma glosses over the epistomological crisis that authorship raises for the social sciences, namely, whether the researcher or the research method is telling the story.

The performance of students who rewrote an experimenter-provided set of instructions in dyads or individually was compared with that of individuals who wrote without access to those instructions. A total of 49 students participated in the experiment. The rewriting groups were provided with sample instructions and were asked to improve them; the writing group simply wrote instructions. All students then wrote a second set of instructions individually. The results showed that on the first task both the dyadic rewriting group and the individual writing group significantly outperformed the individual rewriting group on a communication score. Significant differences were also found on the completeness score. The ordering of means on this measure from highest to lowest was individual rewriters, dyadic rewriters, and the writing individuals.

This essay constructs frameworks for understanding how organizations may function as rhetorical contexts. Initially, traditional and modern approaches to rhetorical context are compared and conclusions are drawn about where organizations, as a form of context, may fit within each. Then two approaches to organizational theory that have implications for the study and practice of writing are elaborated.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of teacher training in the NWP model on student writing. The sample consisted of 383 students, in junior and senior high school at the time of the study, with ten essays each gathered over three years. Teachers responded to a questionnaire of practices in teaching composition. Results favored the treatment group at the junior high level. The highest mean score was achieved by senior high students of trained teachers. Statistically significant differences were found between trained and nontrained teachers for four instructional practices and for the amount of interaction with other professionals.

We review automaticity, effortless writing that comes with freedom from excessive conscious interference, in terms of its origins in automatic writing and its growth into contemporary techniques such as free writing. We characterize automaticity (a) as a form of dissociation from consciousness, (b) as an aid to spontaneity and creativity, and (c) as a key to understanding why some writers block more readily than others. Conclusion: All forms of automaticity resemble hypnosis and, so, should be used with carefully planned structures and cautions.

Speech that is authentically oral tends to avoid language that is abstract and conceptual in favor of “down to earth” language. Literacy tends to encourage the former at the expense of the latter. Our educational system starting at the primary level should encourage the latter even while teaching habits of reading and writing. This can be done by including oral recitation in the curriculum and in particular recitation of popular poetry accompanied by music, dance, and also memorization. The modern media, despite their use of electronic sound and image, tend to overuse conceptual language to disguise the hard meaning of what is being communicated. The management of the public relations of the shuttle disaster offered a striking illustration of this habit.

Professional writers frequently use socially shared “metaphorical stories” to describe their composing. In one prominent metaphorical story, writers of fiction cast their characters as collaborators in the process of writing, in consequence providing a complicated and integrated description of their composing. For writers of fiction to ascribe independence to their characters has implications that go far beyond the “performance” concerns of authors engaged in literary discussions: Metaphorical stories are an important means by which people understand as well as communicate their composing experiences.

This pilot study investigated relationships between individual differences in levels of writing skills and proficiencies at simultaneous and successive cognitive processing. Data from a group of 46 subjects indicate that scores on successive processing tasks were able to predict final grades in an introductory English composition course (p<.01). This suggested both the possibility and importance of investigating further how simultaneous and (especially) successive processing relate to writing skills. With three subjects used for pilot data, low scores in successive processing showed relationships with sentence-level errors and with the ability to develop sequences of ideas in writing. Low scores in simultaneous processing correlated with an inability to indicate clear relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Planning, a third cognitive factor, was found to be a powerful influence in organizing content. In the interaction of planning and simultaneous processing, lack of planning ability may interfere with the writer's ability to survey and thus organize his or her material.

Presented here is a brief report of a study along with an extensive criticism of this and other studies that use contrived tasks for investigating children's humor and writing. The original study had hoped to anwer questions related to how child-produced humor might vary with the sex and age of the intended audience, how writing would figure in child-produced humor, and any relationships that might exist between production of and talk about humor. Two middle-class fourth-grade classrooms were told a contrived story and asked to produce something funny for some sick children. Children in one class produced something for two sick children, both male, one in first and one in eighth grade. The other class produced something for two sick children, both female, one in first and one in eighth grade. Productions (N = 136) were collected and analyzed. Of the fourth graders, 9 were then interviewed about their conceptions of humor and of their productions. Children's productions did vary according to the age and sex of the intended audience. There were no particular relationships between the humor of variability of the productions and the talk about humor. The major criticism in this and similar studies is that the data are flawed. Despite efforts in the opposite direction, the contrived task produced a confused pragmatic context. Once the pragmatics were distorted, the data no longer represented the phenomena of interest—humor and writing. Without extensive observations and interviews, there is little evidence that these findings represent what the chosen variables make them appear to represent. An argument is thus made for increased sensitivity to what phenomena research data actually represent.

Summaries of expository texts were obtained from undergraduate students and examined for the nature of text-to-summary mapping by asking judges to identify the text sentences of origin for every summary sentence. The analysis revealed that simple omission and one-to-one mapping of text sentences into summary sentences were the most favored strategies. Following these in order of frequency were the combining of pairs, triples, and longer runs of text sentences that were predominantly adjacent in the texts, showing a strong tendency to preserve the original order of text sentences. Although writers did not select the same text sentences for omission, it was possible to identify a core set of text sentences that was always preserved in summaries of the larger texts. These sets, when compared with randomly selected sets in their original order, appeared as meaningful and coherent “mini-texts” to independent judges. The results are discussed in the light of Brown, Day, & Jones's (1983) identification of a “mature” summarizing strategy in which narrative texts are reorganized and condensed by combining text sentences across paragraphs. It is suggested that the “mature strategy” does not appear in these results because the structure of expository text resists easy reorganization, and because a severe length constraint was not imposed.

This article presents a rationale for studying collaborative writing and evidence that coauthors can learn about the writing process from each other. Collaborative writing is explored as an instructional activity that can help students expand their repertoire of writing strategies and their mastery of written communication skills. Collaborative writing activities also offer researchers new insights into the writing process. This discussion about collaborative writing is followed by a case study of two coauthors in the fourth grade who represent general findings from a larger study of 43 fourth- and fifth-grade writers. Detailed analyses of the composing sessions, individual texts, collaborative texts, and interviews indicate that coauthors share creative input, evaluative perspectives, composing strategies, and notions about “good writing” when they work together. Collaborative writing, thus, can complement instruction because it is a direct—albeit subtle—form of learning.

Two hypotheses are outlined about the reasons for obscurity in expository writing. Neither accounts adequately for the general results of an exploratory study of the writing of postgraduates nor for the individual cases I present by way of illustration. A crucial factor, I suggest, is a person's implicit model of expository writing. Many of our subjects assume that the purpose of technical writing is to compress thought. I argue, on the contrary, that clarity is achieved through expansion.

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

A group of graduate students in English and language education were given a series of instructor-designed and self-designed reading and writing tasks. They wrote formal papers in response to these tasks and kept retrospective journals describing their reading and writing strategies. The study looks at the nature of introspective accounts and the usefulness of such accounts in studies of the composing process. Several writing tasks are described and analyzed, and three brief case studies are presented. The study concludes that retrospective journal accounts are a rich source of information because they permit consideration of the complex context within which composing occurs.

This study explored the collaborative writing processes of a group of computer software company executives. In particular, the study focused on the year-long process that led to the writing of a vital company document. Research methods used included participant/observations, open-ended interviews, and Discourse-Based Interviews. A detailed analysis of the executive collaborative process posits a model that describes the reciprocal relationship between writing and the organizational context. The study shows the following: (1) how the organizational context influences (a) writers' conceptions of their rhetorical situations, and (b) their collaborative writing behavior; and (2) how the rhetorical activities influence the structure of the organization.

Contradictory approaches to context and written language have clouded understanding of the nature and role of context in composition. This article treats writing within a larger framework of context and language use in general to suggest important interrelationships among writer, context, and text. Implications for writing-process research are examined.

We have extended the measurement of content complexity to a practical level by developing a model for evaluating a particularly complex body of information: the federal income tax laws. United States tax law has been seriously criticized as being overly complex, and the capital gain or loss tax preference significantly contributes to this complexity. By developing and applying a content analysis measurement model, we have determined that over 15% of the tax law's complexity is attributable to the capital gain and loss preference and that this preference affects 65% of all income tax sections. The consequences of this complexity are currently an unresearched area. The findings confirm the hypothesis that the capital gain and loss preference substantially complicates the income tax law in both absolute and relative terms.

Students in grades 5, 7, 9, 11, and college were first taught to play a board game by watching a demonstration film and then were given the task of writing directions for the game. These written explanations were analyzed to examine grade-related changes in the overall informativeness of the explanations, in the kinds of elements that students tended to explain adequately, in the extent to which students included orienting information for their readers, and in the degree to which students adopted elements of a formal (or “official”) approach when explaining the game. The results provide a rich description of the growth of students' informative writing skills between the upper-elementary grades and the beginning of college.

This article focuses on ways in which school-age children “make meaning” when they are involved in reading and writing activities. An Analysis of Meaning Construction procedure was developed to describe the knowledge sources, specific strategies, and monitoring behaviors of 67 third-, sixth-, and ninth-grade children when they read and wrote stories and reports. Each student participated in either a think-aloud or retrospective self-report activity during (or after) reading and writing four story and report passages. The resulting transcripts were segmented into communication units and analyzed using the meaning analysis system. Comparisons were made between genres (story and report), domains (reading and writing), and ages (grades 3, 6, and 9). Findings indicate that meaning-making behaviors (1) are complex and varied, (2) change with age and difficulty, and (3) vary consistently between reading and writing. Although reading and writing are related language activities in that they tap similar underlying processes, it is inaccurate to conceptualize them as predominantly similar; reading and writing are also quite different in that the processes they invoke follow markedly different patterns.

Teachers of writing have currently been showing an interest in error analysis, a device that has been used informally for some time but has received serious attention from linguists and language teaching methodologists only recently. This interest in error analysis seems strange because this type of analysis possesses many of the characteristics of structuralism and few (if any) of the characteristics of tranformationalism. As a result, the objections to error analysis are partly theoretical in nature. Because the number of sentences in a language is infinite, the number of different kinds of errors that students can make is infinite or, at least, indefinitely large. Because of this, the chance of a student producing a particular sentence exhibiting a particular error is very small. This is the principal reason behind the creation of vague, general, and subsequently rather meaningless categories in the taxonomies that are used in error analysis. For this reason, it would seem to be appropriate for teachers to abandon error analysis and lead students through the use of creative language exercises into the writing of creative sentences.

Drawing upon the ideas of Susanne K. Langer and emphasizing noncommunicative aspects of writing, this article presents a theory describing the evolution of text. This article first distinguishes between discursive symbolism—the use of language to describe verifiable outward reality—and presentational symbolism—the production of symbols, often nonverbal, to objectify states of consciousness. It goes on to argue that authors resort to presentational symbolism in order to refresh and replenish their discursive language. Thus text derives in part from preverbal and even preintellectual mental operations. The frequently remarked recursiveness of text production may result from authors' discovering their discursive meanings as they return to the presentational imports from which the meanings arise, much of the whole process of composition growing out of the interaction between these two kinds of mental activity. The article examines the implications of this theory for understanding students' writing behavior and for improving instruction in writing.

Although the Amphiareion of Oropos is virtually unmentioned by ancient authors, epigraphical evidence reveals that for centuries this sanctuary was a frequent site of rhetorical and literary contests as well as a repository of written communication on these events. Based upon field work in Greece and archaeological reports, inscriptions are examined with other archaeological evidence to reconstruct the nature and duration of these events. This study illustrates that even a relatively small site can yield findings of major importance for the history of rhetoric and emphasizes that scholars should engage in such primary research.

That written language is not an image of oral language can be deduced from functions; it has an independent role in linguistic communication. As an independent system of signs, written language mediates between its producers, recipients, and reality. The fact that various written languages in their development have made use of essential principles of oral language can be attributed to methodological economy. In this respect the stages of “phonetization” are no doubt remarkable events in the history of written and oral language. They are of fundamental importance for the further development of both. Nevertheless phonetization in no way inherently defines written language. The effects of written language and its motivation are investigated. Taking historical determination as a basis, both of them lead from the contemporary, manifold interrelations between oral and written language to the search for the original causes and conditions for the emergence of written language. The emergence of written language results from social needs and the individual needs these include, which are in turn conditioned by concrete historical circumstances.

This article for the Emhart Corporation, a large multinational manufacturer, addresses the growing misunderstanding of the press by big business in terms that a businessperson can understand. We draw parallels between the functional operations of business and a metropolitan newspaper. It is not surprising that the often feared and mistrusted reporter and editor have their counterparts in the typical business organization.

Many researchers in composition instruction assume that free and journal writing exclusively and necessarily produce “meaningful” writing. This is not substantiated in their limited case study research, or in the research of anyone else. We need to establish a precise definition of “meaningful” writing, determine its place in the curriculum, and determine better means of designing instruction that produces writing that is both meaningful and of high quality. The meta-analysis of Hillocks (1984) indicates that structured composition assignments produce better writing than nondirectional writing experiences. This article explores the reasons for this, and establishes hypotheses based on these reasons for developing a theory of composition instruction. The hypotheses support a need for structured instruction, rather than student-generated direction.

Although textbooks emphasize the importance of attention-getting introductions, such devices are hard to explain and hard for students to recognize. Perhaps even more important, such an emphasis may suggest to students a vastly oversimplified view of the reading process.

This article discusses how research on the origins of writing from such fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and history provides new perspectives on current writing research and on the teaching of writing. Four major issues are considered: (1) the functions of writing, (2) the influence of writing and writing systems on the writer, (3) the role of the writing topic on writing, and (4) writing and the decontextualization of knowledge. The implications of these issues for research on and the teaching of writing are considered.