Although there has not yet been established a definitive relationship between syntactic manipulation (sentence combining) and reading improvement, researchers have for a long time been raising questions about the possible interrelationships of these two language-processing activities. In this paper, I suggest a conceptual basis for asserting a relationship at the sentence level between sentence combining and reading. Before exploring this relationship explicitly, it may be helpful to review some of the concepts in the psycholinguistic model of reading on which this assertion can be based. Current research in the reading process has led to the conclusion that the world knowledge and personal knowledge that the reader brings to the printed page make an important contribution to that person's ability to extract meaning from the printed page. That prior knowledge can come from experience or it may include familiarity with the three elements of the reading process identified in current psycholinguistic research: recognizing graphic-phonic (letter-sound) similarities, syntactic processing, and semantic processing. Examining these latter two elements of the reading process in particular helps to explain the contribution of sentence combining activities to improvement in reading comprehension. In an earlier article,' I pointed out that there appears to be considerable evidence that complex syntactic structures are more difficult for readers to process than simpler ones. Inexperienced readers have difficulty holding syntactic patterns and meanings in their memories long enough to be able to link them up correctly within the sentences that they are working with. This difficulty is explained by a principle from psychology and from the psycholinguistic model of reading. That principle is the concept of the chunk. chunk has best been explicated by George Miller in his seminal article, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.2 Miller explains that short-term memory can hold from five to seven items of information at any one time. key to understanding the processing of information is understanding what it is that constitutes an item in short-term memory. Each item may be a single

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IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise:

The ornate style practiced before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century too often led to obscurity and verbal games rather than clarity and the pursuit of truth. In reacting against ornateness, however, scientists developed the ideal of a plain style that is itself problematic. The writer's posture is essentially defensive; he is more concerned with what not to do than what to do in his writing. The practice of amplification, useful for audience adaptation, has been abandoned, and rhetorical devices that promote the personal touch are no longer taught. Recent experiments indicate that classroom exercises involving rhetorical devices can help promote economy and clarity, encourage more personal and aggressive writing, strengthen the idea that writing is an art, and arouse writer and reader interest. The study of stylistic devices in use before the scientific revolution can be fruitful for modern scientific and technical writing.

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Decisive Writing; An Improvement Program. L. P. Driskill and Margaret Simpson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Prose Style For The Modern Writer. Robert Miles and Marc F. Bertonasco. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1977.

The Plural I: The Teaching of Writing. William E. Coles, Jr. With a Foreward by Richard Larson. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1978. Prose Style and Critical Reading. Robert Cluett. New York: Columbia University, 1976. Pp. 316. The Language of Adam: On the Limits and Systems of Discourse. Russell Fraser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pp. 255. THE RHETORIC OF SCIENCE AND THE ASSAULT ON AMBIGUITY

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advantages and limitations of informal and unsophisticated word-counts as a tool in the of prose. My subject is the prose style of a novelist, Thomas Hardy. But I am less concerned with Hardy's style as such than with drawing some general conclusions from the discussion, to suggest that word-counts are useful in two ways. First, they do what they are supposed to do: they make evidence precise and specific, and thus provide verifiable links between text and theory. And second, they help the critic to do what they in themselves cannot do: that is, in addition to verifying what we already know, word-counts serve by their limitations as ways of discovery, as ways of finding out things we did hot know before. My experience, then, underscores Josephine Miles's view that analysis works to support and invite intuition.... It does not create, invent, imagine, lead to values; but given values, it clarifies and discerns, helping us to understand the relation between what

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