Text transmitted electronically through computer-mediated communication networks is an increasingly available yet little documented form of written communication. This article examines the syntactic and stylistic features of an emergent phenomenon called Interactive Written Discourse (IWD) and finds that the concept of “register,” a language variety according to use, helps account for the syntactic reductions and omissions that characterize this historical juxtaposition of text format with real-time and interactive pressures. Similarities with another written register showing surface brevity, the note taking register, are explored. The study is an empirical examination of written communication from a single discourse community, on a single topic, with a single recipient, involving 23 experienced computer users making travel plans with the same travel advisor by exchanging messages through linked computers. The study shows rates of omissions of subject pronouns, copulas, and articles and suggests that IWD is a hybrid, showing features of both spoken and written language. In tracing variable use of conventions such as sentence initial lower case and parentheses, the study shows that norms are gradually emerging. This form of written communication demands study because, as capabilities expand, norms associated with this medium of communication may come to influence or even replace those of more traditional writing styles.

The widespread use of irony in academic writing raises issues not considered in most psychological, linguistic, or literary approaches to irony: How is irony signalled in a written text? What are the constraints of politeness within academic discourse that govern the use and interpretation of irony? This essay considers the interpretation of one kind of irony—ironic quotation—in a controversy between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Irony in these published exchanges is then compared to irony in conference discussions and unpublished papers in linguistics and to irony in other disciplines. Although the analysis follows psychological and linguistic accounts of irony as echoic mention in which the same words can be reused with a different intention, it begins with the rhetorical relation of the quoting writer, the quoted writer, and the reader as members of disciplinary communities. The instances of irony that are considered both define these relations and assume them as a basis for interpretation. This analysis suggests that the study of irony can serve as a means of understanding disciplines and of examining our own taken-for-granted assumptions as academic writers.

The authors recount their attempt to analyze a case study in terms of two conflicting rhetorics: a collectivist rhetoric that values most the contributions individuals make to an ongoing collective project and an individualist rhetoric that values most the original and autonomous voice. These two rhetorics conflict in the experience of one writer working concurrently in a literature seminar within a university English department and in the public relations office of a reproductive services agency. This conflict, centering on different rhetorical ethics, had less to do with competence than with commitment: the writer's commitment to the individualist ethics practiced in the writing she did in the literature seminar prevented her from valuing the writing she did at the agency that worked toward a collectivist end. The authors then examine how this analysis is problematized by alternative interpretations of this case that demonstrate that the collectivist rhetoric practiced by researchers and theorists of writing itself involves the interaction of conflicting individualist assertions. This analysis suggests that the most useful theoretical insights any case might provide into the question of how writing ought to be taught are embodied in the exchange of interpretations that case provokes and in the confrontation of diverse arguments that emerge from that exchange.

Researchers and teachers are joining in a movement to introduce more collaborative work in language arts classrooms. While collaborative learning and writing are valuable activities in any classroom, not enough is understood about what happens when collaborative activities are introduced into a traditional classroom discourse structure. This study analyzes a collaborative activity, both as a traditional classroom event and as a collaborative event. The results of the analysis suggest that, even when the activity is explicitly collaborative and students are experienced collaborators, patterns of traditional classroom discourse dominate their communicative choices.

Explaining difficult ideas to lay readers is an important and frequently needed writing skill. When explaining, writers must recognize and overcome the confusions that lay readers may experience in learning abstract concepts. To date, there has been little study of this demanding writing skill. Consequently, this article identifies a particular class of explanatory discourse and proposes working hypotheses about the types of knowledge likely to be associated with skill in this genre. These hypotheses are explored through a study of individual differences in explanatory writing skill among 169 college students. The results of the study showed that variations in the accuracy and adaptiveness of the students' explanations were partially accounted for by measures of topic knowledge, social cognition, and discourse knowledge. A discourse knowledge index and a topic knowledge index were correlated with explanatory writing skill. Cognitive complexity, a measure of social cognition, was associated with adaptiveness in explaining but not accuracy. These findings suggest that explanatory skill is a function of several types of knowledge and that it may be as dependent on discourse or rhetorical knowledge as it is on topical expertise.

This article considers the complex processes involved in readers' and writers' construction of textual meaning: how people construct meaning from texts through reading and for texts through writing. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual cues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from the text and connect with material they generate. This constructivist characterization of the reading process extends also to literate acts in which people are writers as well as readers, those acts in which they compose texts by drawing from textual sources. To meet their discourse goals, writers perform textual transformations associated with the operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting as they appropriate source material for uses in different communicative contexts. They dismantle source texts and reconfigure content they select from these sources, and they interweave the source material with content they generate from stored knowledge. The article describes the kinds of transformations that occur through reading and writing, and proposes a way to think about tasks that invite writers to transform extant texts. Theoretical issues are raised, and suggestions are made for further research.

This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each intern's writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.

This article discusses two sets of neurological case histories, A. R. Luria's The Man with a Shattered World and Oliver Sack's Awakenings, and argues that these histories display two paradigmatic explanations for the mind/brain relation, and that the movement from one paradigm to another also necessitates a movement to different forms of discourse. One explanation comes from the physical sciences and results in logical, quantitative exposition. The other originates in the human sciences and results in narrative. Luria and Sacks wrote these case histories in an explicit attempt to bridge—in understanding and in discourse—this paradigmatic gap; in the process, they redefined what it means to be a neuropsychiatrist. Case histories allow the writer to combine the empirical analysis characteristic of neurological discourse with the individual detail characteristic of psychological narrative.

Understanding the effects of readers on writing development requires prior conceptualization of the relationship between writers and readers. Recently two major schools of thought have emerged concerning this relationship: social constructionism and social interactionism. Influenced by Saussure's structuralist concept of la langue as a set of language norms and Durkheim's concept of social fact, social constructionists emphasize normal, standard discourse: Their key principle is empirical consensus, their unit of analysis is the canon, and their level of social analysis is the community. By contrast, social interactionists, following Bakhtin, focus directly on situated, heteroglossic discourse and seek to characterize la parole, or language use, in useful terms: Their key principle is reciprocity between conversants, and their unit of analysis, as well as their level of social analysis, is the communicational dyad (writer-reader pairs; speaker-listener pairs). Because they focus on whole writer-reader communities, social constructionists deal with the effects of readers on writers in general terms, and they typically reify readers into “the Reader” when dealing with individual cases. By contrast, social interactionists, who concern themselves with describing actual, individual writers and readers, often in ethnographic studies, must articulate a principled analysis of writers and readers without analytic access recourse to group norms. This article first contrasts social constructionist and social interactionist approaches to the problem of discourse and then examines recent social interactionist studies concerning the effects of readers on writers' development, including investigations of word-segmentation skills, peer conferencing, and instructional discourse.

Occasional dissent notwithstanding, “expository” prose—usually conceived as depersonalized and decontextualized—continues to be the main focus of most writing instruction at the secondary and college levels. This article critically examines the opposition of objectified exposition and personal narrative posited by rhetorical tradition and maintained by most composition texts and syllabi today. The liveliness of recent cross-disciplinary discussions regarding the narrative as a uniquely rich mode of thought and discourse contrasts rather sharply with the negative and often impoverished assumptions about storied prose held by most composition theorists and teachers. Unsupported by empirical evidence, such assumptions reflect a cultural bias that prefers abstractions to stories and fails to grasp their dynamic interplay. Where writing instruction is concerned, narrative and exposition are best perceived as poles of a dialectic, with personal experience informing one's interest in abstract knowledge beyond the self, the understanding self becoming enlarged as it “takes in” what is “out there.” The best thinking and writing, it is argued, are at once personal and public, both infused with private meaning and focused upon the world beyond the self.

Is “the writer's audience always a fiction,” as Walter Ong contends, even when the writing is not poetry or fiction but scientific prose? To demonstrate the usefulness of Ong's approach to audience for analysts of nonfiction prose and for those who wish to empower student writers, we consider from a reader-response perspective two scientific articles on the same general topic written for the same discourse community in the same year. The authors of the two essays (prestigious scientists) directed their readers into two radically different roles. One makes his readers not only into “conventional” scientists but into willing novices who take note of his presentation but who do not take issue with it; the other creates disciplinary nonconformists, inquistive skeptics who have the perspectives necessary to understand the limits of scientific thought. The analysis elaborates the rhetorical nature of scientific discourse, demonstrates that even within the constraints of the journal article scientists have considerable freedom to exercise choices, and explicates how writers use cues to direct readers into fictional roles.

Writing in the humanities may, typically, be distinguished from writing in the social sciences in its treatments of abstractions. Writing about literature is here characterized as data-driven, in that it begins with a text and proceeds up the ladder of abstraction by interpretive classifications which are likely to diverge from one interpreter to another. Social science writing is described as conceptually driven, in that writers begin with communally defined abstractions which then drive the selection and discussion of data; the divergence between writers' abstractions characteristic of data-driven writing is less likely to occur in conceptually driven writing. This article describes how the difference shows up in professional academic writing, some of the confusion students experience in trying to shift from one kind of writing to another, the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of writing, and the benefits to be gained from alternating between the two kinds.

Personal voice in writing is currently an all-too-subjectively understood notion. Different authors, Coles and Elbow, for example, have drawn appropriate attention to the voice phenomenon, but objective definitions and practical understanding are still lacking. One step toward understanding the workings of voice can be taken, however, by a linguistic analysis of structures that observably cause perception of a personal voice. Examining a limited set of data from professional writing reveals that one clear source of voice is appositive and parenthetical structures. These structures are produced “paragrammatically” by being inserted into a sentence, interrupting its normal flow, with the effect of creating a personal voice. They have a commentative function associated with a second-order “reflective mentality” and can be classified into at least three structural subtypes—displacements, equivalents, and interruptives—correlating with particular commentative functions. This analysis suggests, in general, that distinguishing between a second-order reflective mentality and a first-order factive mentality is central to the perception of voice. The intuitions of compositionists are important in uncovering discourse properties relevant to composition studies, and linguistic analysis is important for successful description of the phenomena and as a basis for pedagogical application.

This article traces the evolution of “Once upon a time” in a child's classroom story writing, drawing upon data collected in a three-year study of writing development in an urban magnet school. The developmental literature on young children's literacy has treated story language as a set of structural routines that children learn from being read to, routines that serve the function of representing imaginary worlds. In contrast, this article assumes that stories are cultural discourse forms that serve multiple functions and that to internalize those forms, children must transform them into tools that are functional within their own social world. Moreover, children's discourse forms and functions are in a dialectical relationships: The initially awkward forms children produce may have limited social meaning—but those forms may elicit social responses that embue them with new functional possibilities and thus lead children to further grappling with forms. In brief, the story forms young children learn from others are not the end products but the catalysts of development.

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

Each year a large number of students enter American higher education unprepared for the reading and writing tasks they encounter. Labeled “remedial,”“nontraditional,”“developmental,”“underprepared,”“nonmainstream,” these students take special courses and participate in special programs designed to qualify them to do academic work. Yet, we do not know very much about what it is that cognitively and socially defines such students as remedial. This article describes a research project on remediation at the community college, state college, and university levels designed to provide such information. We focus on a piece of writing produced by a student in an urban community college, examining it in the context of the student's past experiences with schooling, her ideas about reading and writing, the literacy instruction she was receiving, and her plans and goals for the future. Our analyses suggest that the student's writing, though flawed according to many standards, demonstrates a fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—how human beings continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) was created by the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 as a means of ensuring careful study of possible effects on the environment of projects involving public lands and as an aid to effective decisions regarding such projects. This article presents a case study involving the reading of several EISs produced by one government agency, the Bureau of Land Management. An analysis of these documents reveals that, to answer the leading question of rhetoricians in the field of technical writing—Is the document effective?—we must consider the social and cultural context of the EIS as well as the characteristics of the text, its organization and style. Simple notions of purpose and audience are ruled out. We must account for pragmatics as well as syntactics and semantics. The very category of “effectiveness” is conditioned by the historical and political forces that shape the EIS. An approach through genre theory is recommended.

This essay reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannen's (1985) distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Rather than seeing message in tension with involvement, this query treats message as an embodiment of involvement. Cohesion particularly is treated as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship, an outgrowth of a thickening commitment to a mutual orientation. Speculations are offered for rethinking what is called “literate orientation.”

This program evaluation was undertaken to assess the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition. In total, 24 classes were studied—12 control classes and 12 experimental—with the experimental computer classes meeting in the lab for half of their instructional time. Data on the success of the program were collected from a range of sources: pre- and posttests of student writing under both impromptu and take-home conditions; pre- and posttests of writing anxiety; records on attendance, tardiness, withdrawals, and homework and essay assignment completion; end-of-term course evaluation by both teachers and students; and self-report data collected from teacher meetings and teacher logs. Results favored the use of computers, with computer students revising and improving their posttest essays (especially discourse-level features) at levels significantly better than those of regular students. Those students in experimental sections who chose to compose on computers at the end of the term outperformed the group as a whole and performed significantly better than those experimental students who chose to compose with pen and paper. Attitudinal data from both students and teachers also favored the use of computers.

In this decade, writing researchers have shown increasing interest in the social aspects of written communication. This interest has largely been stimulated by interest in writing-across-the-curriculum programs and dialogue journal keeping, as well as such pressing issues as the relationships of process to text and to the social contexts of writing, and the problem of genre. This article outlines a social-interactive model of written communication, highlighting the writer's role in negotiations with readers in the medium of text. Formalist theories of text meaning (meaning is in the text) and idealist theories of meaning (meaning in the reader) are reviewed and challenged. In social-interactive theories of discourse, which are proposed as an alternative to formalist and idealist theories, meaning is said to be a social construct negotiated by writer and reader through the medium of text, which uniquely configures their respective purposes. In the process of communicating, writers and readers may be said to make various “moves,” which achieve progressive and sequential “states” of understanding between them. Writers make three essential kinds of moves: They (1) initiate and (2) sustain written discourse, which they accomplish by means of (3) text elaboration. The rules for writers' moves are spelled out in a fundamental axiom and seven corollaries.

Metadiscourse commonly is defined as “discourse about discoursing.” In its brief history, the term has appeared in several studies of text structure; however, theorists disagree concerning the functions and forms of metadiscursive structures and the role of metadiscourse in a larger theory of text linguistics. This study provides representative examples of the problems that diminish the utility of the metadiscourse theories that currently are available. It then proposes an alternative theory that locates metadiscourse within the larger context of speech act theory. The study defines metadiscourse as indicators of expositive illocutionary acts, and it then provides a taxonomy of metadiscursive functions and forms.

Although many writers depend on guidelines for help in using language properly and effectively, those guidelines typically lack empirical justification and, as a result, are sometimes oversimplified or even misconceived. In this article, we illustrate this point by examining the guideline that tells writers not to use the existential, or “empty,” there. A 100,000-word survey of good writing shows that expert writers apparently ignore this guideline. Using a discourse-sensitive form of linguistic analysis, we explain why these violations of the rule occur. Expert writers use there for important linguistic and rhetorical purposes: to assert existence, to present new information, to introduce topics, and to summarize. Based on our findings, we claim that there is little justification for having a prescriptive rule against the existential there. We argue further that the methodology employed here, which relies on quantitative and qualitative analysis rather than on conventional wisdom, can and should be extended to other handbook rules.

This essay examines self-portrayal in fictional and nonfictional written discourse. The essay focuses on various treatments of self-representation in rhetorical and literary critical theory in an effort to overcome the conceptual and terminological confusion that has arisen across time and disciplinary specialties in the discussion of self-portrayal. The essay argues that two common terms for describing self-representation—ethos and persona— are often conflated but that there are good historical and conceptual grounds for maintaining a distinction between them. Such a distinction refines our critical vocabulary for analyzing the multidimensional nature of self-representation in writing.

Two famous passages in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War illustrate the origins of scientific writing and shed further light on the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. uses a structure based on the Hippocratic approach, as well as “scientific” medical terminology. The report of the plague is immediately followed by Pericles' Funeral Oration. Similar themes appear in both segments, but the rhetorical strategies are markedly different. This article analyzes the juxtaposed examples of scientific and epideictic discourse by applying theories from rhetoric and sociology advanced by Perelman, Fahnestock, Havelock, and Durkheim, as well as schema theory and reader-response theories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.