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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.