It is generally agreed that writing was invented in Sumer, ancient Mesopotamia and present-day Iraq, and spread from there to other parts of the Middle East such as Egypt. The article reviews an archaic system of notation using tokens that is the direct progenitor of Sumerian writing.

At least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage, especially during the past 250 years. They may be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summaries that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives. Each type of summary developed in response to challenges facing professions, government, business, and ordinary citizens-all of whom have sought to absorb increasing quantities of information being generated in a society that is becoming more complex. This taxonomy offers a definition and brief history for each of the seven techniques, describes the growth of corporations or other organizations that can be considered leading practitioners, and comments on the potential continuing role for each type of summary. The article also focuses on several contemporary issues that will affect future research, classroom writing instruction, and information management in modern computerized offices.

The primary hypothesis was that field independent subjects would produce discourse that would be judged more coherent than the discourse of field dependent subjects. A total of 44 subjects in their first term of college composition were selected from a group of 60 volunteers from two universities and a community college. Each subject was administered the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and the Group Embedded Figures Test. There were five research conditions: Three evoked oral responses, and one evoked a written response. A group of readers unaware of the nature of the research evaluated each response holistically, rating it in terms of a coherence scale. Coherence scores were then analyzed in relation to cognitive style classification. The primary hypothesis was supported by the data. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated significant cognitive style effect, F(6,25) = 4.82, p <.0001. The correlation between cognitive style and coherence was significant, r(32) = .54, p <.002. The results suggest that cognitive style is a significant variable in explaining differences between good writers and poor ones.

Some of the attempts to establish what standards can define acceptable writing have resulted in the development of grading scales of one sort or another. The controversy about using grading scales to evaluate written composition has received much attention in research and in theory over the past 50 years, but the results of a survey of 600 members of the College Section of National Council of Teachers of English revealed that in the spring of 1984 only 45 or 11.6% of the 386 respondents actually used scales in their evaluations of freshman composition. The theoretical interest in these scales is apparently not matched by their use by teachers of freshman composition.

A critical area in the advancement of literacy is the production of textbooks that reflect recent insights on language and discourse. However, this project is problematic within the established procedures whereby textbooks are reviewed and approved. This article presents an ethnography of one author's experience and suggests some guidelines whereby rational criteria might be widely established.

The composition teaching we tend to associate with nineteenth-century schools was exemplified by A. S. Hill's courses at Harvard, which emphasized correctness, clarity, stylistic refinements, and organization. But there was also a “reform tradition” that stressed the importance of the student's interests and experience, and saw the writing task as based on observation, description, speaking, and listening. Inspired partly by romantic educational theories from the continent, this tradition grew out of the social and educational reforms of the 1830s and 1840s and provided the basis for the early progressive teaching of the 1890s.

This protocol study identifies college readers' purposeful behaviors when writing from sources, determines whether these behaviors cluster at identifiable stages in the reading-writing process, and determines whether proficient and less able readers' processes are the same. The results showed that the subjects did not approach the task of writing from sources in the same way. All subjects referred to the reading sources as they composed, but they consulted them at different points in the reading-writing process. Overall the better readers engaged in more planning than the less able group. Findings show strong associations between reading level and use of study-skill reading strategies, postreading-prewriting strategies, and composing strategies.

In sentences with validity markers in the syntactic subject and adjacent positions, the frequent correspondence between syntactic subject and sentence topic in English sentences is broken. Because this correspondence has been shown to have substantial and positive effects upon readers' processing of and perceptions about texts, breaking the correspondence might have significant negative effects on readers. This study begins to explore how such syntactic subjects affect readers. It shows that readers recall such subjects very poorly, but it also suggests that in order to discover more precisely how readers represent such subjects in memory, new and rich models of language and of possible domains in texts will be needed.

Two studies based on an information theory model of reader enjoyment investigated the role of syntactic and semantic unpredictability in determining readers' evaluations of journalistic prose. In each study, reader enjoyment ratings for a set of articles reporting a single news event were compared with cloze procedure results in which function-word and content-word responses were analyzed separately using entropy and cloze scoring techniques. Both studies revealed a statistically significant correlation between function-word predictability and reader enjoyment. In addition, a strong correlation between content-word unpredictability and reader enjoyment in one study supported the notion that readers prefer texts that are characterized by a high degree of semantic unpredictability.

Readers and evaluators of children's writing still fall back on deficit explanations; papers are read for signs of what they lack rather than signs of growth. Presented here is a model that predicts how such growth may occur as a logical outcome of language acquisition. Drawing on research done in the past, the article provides a list of the kinds of language learning underway in the elementary school years and suggests that teachers may use this list to anticipate where and how such learning will influence the writing processes of children. Included in the list are sentence syntax, spelling conventions, and discourse grammars, all of which seem to be learned by “creative construction” (hypothesis building and refinement) and, to some extent, memorization. The article argues that children's writing performance is likely to suffer on one or more writing dimensions as the writer selectively attends to other dimensions of the task. For evaluators and teachers there are implications for feedback, for individual agendas, for revision, and for the kinds of conclusions one may draw from the examination of written products.

This article responds to Burleson and Rowan's (1985) discussion of the relationship between social-cognitive ability and writing skill. A study is reported in which 49 9-year-old children completed a social-cognition task, wrote four compositions (literary/narrative, expressive, referential, and persuasive), and produced oral messages. Correlational analyses showed that social-cognitive ability was most strongly related to the oral task (r = .37), weakly related to the literary/narrative task (r = .25), and very weakly (nonsignificantly) related to performance on the other writing tasks.

This study compared the performance of students who cooperated on an instruction writing task with students who worked alone. The effects of transfer from a cooperative experience to an individual writing task was also assessed. A total of 36 students were recruited from introductory psychology classes and were randomly assigned to a cooperative or individual condition. The results of the study showed that students in the cooperative condition significantly outperformed the individual group on a measure of the communicative quality of the writing on both the initial task and on the transfer task (p s <.01). No differences between the groups were found on a measure of the completeness of the written instruction on either task (p s >.05). It appears that cooperating dyads can improve the communicative quality of their instruction writing.

The social sciences and humanities bring different attitudes and methods to the problem of meaning. From the “scientismic” point of view, meaning is quantifiable and is largely what Tulving called “verbal” knowledge. The scientismic view, however, is flawed in three ways: its failure to account adequately for “episodic” knowledge, to view language as an event, and to understand modes. The literarist view of meaning is equally flawed. However, the scientismists have most of the political power; hence, the literarists are losing the battle for their set of values and their versions of literacy. A realignment of literary studies under the aegis of rhetoric is necessary.

This article presents a general theory of text processing that delineates the parallel operations in reading and writing. In particular, the theory discusses (1) common information location and retrieval procedures, (2) shared cognitive strategies employed to transform background knowledge into a text world, and (3) the role of context in the production of meaning.

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.

Case studies of two proposals for research funding serve as examples of how scientific texts are the products of a community of researchers. Comparisons of successive versions of the proposals show that the two biologists, in revisions of their texts, alter their personae and their relations to the literature of their fields. In writing and rewriting, they both respond to and develop a disciplinary consensus.

The purpose of this study was to examine one type of literacy event in a second grade classroom—“free writing” and, especially, its sharing time phase—from the perspectives of the classroom teacher and selected class members. The study was based on data collected over a 14-week period in a second-grade classroom. Data gathered included observation notes, audiotaped recordings of the children's talk while writing, written products, and child interviews. The study's findings suggest a social fact or dynamic operating in classrooms that has implications for both researchers and practitioners concerned with school writing; that dynamic is the individual child's social life within the classroom itself and, particularly, his or her social interpretations of school writing tasks (what each is trying to do, for whom, and why).

Ability to vary one's style is an important skill of mature writing, and it would be useful to have tests of this skill. We developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories. The style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloze sentences of less experienced students. Style differences, between experienced and inexperienced students, appeared in average sentence lengths, sentence types, and verb-adjective ratios. In another experiment, less experienced students were given explicit instructions to imitate story style; they showed virtually the same adaptability to style as the creative writing group in the first experiment. Thus we have evidence that the cloze test measures style differences between experienced and less experienced writers, and also that responsiveness to style features, distinct from the skill needed to change those features, is a significant component of experienced writing.

This article explores children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them as revealed in the stories and reports they wrote or recalled, and in their responses to questions about each. There were 67 high achieving children in grades 3,6 and 9 who read and wrote similar kinds of stories and reports. This permitted comparison of ways in which they organized their knowledge across genre (story and report) and domain (reading and writing). Findings indicate the following: (1) Children have strongly differentiated notions of stories and reports and structure stories and reports in different ways from early on; (2) They use these structures in the pieces they read and retell as well as in the pieces they write; (3) Both stories and reports grow in complexity along a variety of measures; and (4) Both stories and reports show increased student control of genre-related organizational structures.

Experts on style agree that writers frequently have trouble using the unattended anaphoric this clearly. Few, however, have proposed explicit guidelines for sorting appropriate from inappropriate uses. This article examines the limitations of a recent classification proposed by Moskovit (1983), and then suggests an alternate classification relying on concepts from functional grammar. In particular, Moskovit's distinction between demarcational, syntactic, and semantic reference is found not to predict actual readers' judgments. In its place, the authors suggest a classification based on the functional notions of topic and focus. The unattended this is shown to be English's economical routine for moving the focus of a discourse from nominal topics to clausal predications relating those topics. Before deciding to employ this routine, however, writers are warned to evaluate its consequences on clarity and rhetoric.

Reading, as well as writing, is a constructive activity. Interviews and observations of research physicists reveal reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. These schema, or personal maps of the field, include not only consensual knowledge about the phenomena being discussed, but also perceptions as to the most promising lines of current work, methods that are most likely to produce good results, and personal knowledge about the other workers in the field. Schema thus are formed around the active research purposes of the reader. Equally, purposes are framed within the researcher's schematic understanding of the field. With schema and purposes evolving dialectically, texts are read, not as static arguments, but as part of the dynamic process of research activity.

Incoming freshmen are typically required to write essays which are then holistically rated to determine composition course placement. These placement essays vary not only in topic, but also in the way the topic is structured. Two topic structures are most commonly used: Open (students draw on their own knowledge) and Response (students read a given text and respond to it). It has been established that students perform differently on topic structure itself. To investigate this effect, one topic was used but presented as (1) an Open topic structure, (2) a Response topic structure with one reading passage, and (3) a Response topic structure with three reading passages. The essays, written by college freshmen, were holistically rated for quality and analyzed for fluency, total error, and error ratios. The results indicated that the structure of the topic made a difference in quality, fluency, and total error, but not in any error ratio. These results suggest that, for placement testing, one should first decide which types of students one wishes to identify because each topic structure distinguishes low, average, and high ability students differently.

Rubin, Piché, Michlin, and Johnson (1984) recently presented data allegedly demonstrating a substantial relationship between social-cognitive ability and narrative writing skill. Certain theoretical and statistical considerations led us to suspect that the claimed relationship was not actually present in the data reported by Rubin et al. Consequently, two empirical studies were conducted to test for the hypothesized relationship between social-cognitive ability and narrative writing skill, one study reanalyzing data reported by Rubin et al. and the second analyzing original data. The results of the two studies indicate no relationship between social-cognitive ability and rated quality of narrative essays. These findings are discussed in terms of a theoretical model of the relationships among cognitive abilities, discourse aims, and discourse models.

Sixty subjects, 40 of them blockers, provided over 5000 examples of self-talk accompanying the initiation and completion of writing sessions. An inductive procedure of sorting those thought-list cards into reliable and discrete categories produced 7 cognitive components of blocking (listed in descending order of importance): (1) work apprehension, (2) procrastination, (3) dysphoria, (4) impatience, (5) perfectionism, (6) evaluation anxiety, and (7) rules. Blockers were more likely than nonblockers to list negative thoughts and less likely to evidence “psych-up” thoughts during writing sessions.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentation discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This article traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Henry Day's Art of Rhetoric through contemporary explanatory rhetoric.

Schools should be instructing students in formal thought and expression—what we call “comprehending”—rather than in everyday or “home” thought and language—what we call “understanding.” In this essay we suggest general changes in the standard reading and writing curricula. Finally, we examine the language of writing instruction, in college-level individual writing conferences, to take a close look at issues involved in implementing the curricula for higher and lower achieving students.

This study concerns two related issues pertaining to the evaluation of students' written compositions: the relative effects of content versus mechanics on judgments of quality, and the extent to which raters are able to follow instructions directing them to attend more to one aspect of writing than to another. A college-level expository essay was made weaker in content (by reducing the number of underlying propositions) and in mechanics. The original and altered versions were rated analytically and holistically according to different sets of rating instructions. Analysis of variance indicated that mechanics had a greater influence on raters' judgments than either content or rating instructions. Thus the results suggest that evaluators may not be able to focus on individual criteria of writing quality.

Nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals. In the first part of the study, the letters were analyzed to determine the extent to which subjects adapted them by including context-creating statements, descriptive information, and persuasive appeals. In general, these letters were well adapted to the audiences' needs and characteristics. In the second part of the study, subjects participated in an oral task which provided an index of their competence in listener-adapted communication. This competence was significantly correlated with subjects' use of appeals tailored to characteristics of the two audiences.

This study attempted to describe the structural and content characteristics of actual employment rejection letters (following job screening interviews). Their impact on applicants' feelings about themselves (self-concept and self-satisfaction) and about letters (perceptions of letter clarity, “personalness” and appreciative tone) are assessed. Results provide a profile of the “typical” rejection letter and indicate that while few of the letter characteristics affected applicants' feelings about themselves, a number of these attributes were related to applicants' perceptions of the letters.

We are often suspicious of professional writers' comments about their composing processes because of the aspect of “literary performance.” But we should be equally wary of the accounts of student writers, since they are also unlikely to be veridical. Reasonable, coherent, even captivating accounts are limited by problems of attendance, memory, and reporting, and may be based not on recall but on other cognitive processes. However, despite these problems, retrospective accounts may still prove valuable in studying the writing process.

College students wrote compositions that elicited their technical knowledge of economics, cancer, or growing flowers. They later completed a questionnaire that assessed which information sources had contributed to their knowledge about these topics. We analyzed the extent to which the number and the quality of the ideas generated could be predicted by four major information sources: formal education, mass media, social interaction, and direct experience. Most of the ideas generated were true, culturally familiar, and unsophisticated. The implications of the results are discussed in the context of some cognitive theories of the writing process.

This study uses protocol analysis techniques to compare written evaluations of college freshmen with those of instructors in Freshmen English sections. These evaluations of two students papers indicate that many students apply criteria that are significantly and consistently different from those of instructors. The differences suggest that composition teachers who urge students to “write for their peers” may put themselves in a position of having to reward writing that fails to meet basic expectations of academic audiences.

This article demonstrates the potential of discourse analysis for exploring cognitive processes that occur during writing. Discourse analytic studies and text comprehension studies are reviewed for their contribution to a cognitive process view of writing. Research is reported which combines discourse analysis with on-line pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. Results indicate that decisions regarding predicate relationships are central to sentence production. Some implications for a process model of writing are suggested.

A writer's evaluation of text plays critical, but little examined, roles in the writer's production of text and development as writer. Twenty students, grades 2-6, ranked unevaluated sets of compositions that they or anonymous peers had written; they then were prompted to discuss the factors upon which their rankings were based. Analysis of their evaluations suggests that bases for evaluations can be described in four categories: feelings aroused by text; responses to surface features; responses to text as understood; responses to craftsmanship.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This essay traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Aristotle's Rhetoric through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. A later continuation of this essay will trace explanatory rhetoric into modern times.

Considerations of audience awareness are receiving increased attention in composition theory and pedagogy. Sensitivity to audience characteristics exerts demonstrable effects on composing processes and products. Audience awareness is often conceived as a unitary, global construct, however. In fact, the distinctly identifiable dimensions of social cognition include (1) subskills, (2) coordination of perspectives, (3) content domain, (4) content stability, and (5) audience determinateness. These dimensions and their components are discussed along with their interaction with composing processes. This multidimensional conception of social cognition provides a framework for further composition research and teaching.

Questionaire responses from faculty members in 190 academic departments at 34 universities were analyzed to determine the writing tasks faced by beginning undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to undergraduate English departments, six fields were surveyed: electrical engineering, civil engineering, computer science, chemistry, psychology, and master of business administration programs. Results indicated considerable variability across fields in the kinds of writing required and in preferred assessment topics.

Three studies investigated the knowledge gained by students, ranging from grade 3 to graduate level, from exposure to single examples of literary types. Types were suspense fiction, the journalistic restaurant review, and an invented fictional genre. Students of all ages showed evidence of some pick up of rhetorical knowledge, although of limited complexity. The learning process involved is distinguished from that involved in more gradual learning from exposure to literary models.