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Research and theory in composition is divided regarding the role of audience awareness more generally, social cognition in writing. One position holds that social cognition is central to all composing processes, though the nature of social cognitive activity differs depending on such factors as the function of discourse (e.g., expository or persuasive) and the determinateness of the audience (e.g., a known individual or a generalized other). Another position, in contrast, regards social cognition as coming into play only in manifestly persuasive writing; for most school and literary uses of writing, writers are guided more by genre conventions than by anticipating audience responses. Thirtyfive college freshmen of heterogenous writing abilities wrote a typical academic essay and also a persuasive appeal directed toward a specific readership. They also completed a battery of four social cognitive assessments. Results indicated that the social cognitive assessments predicted 26 percent of the variance in judged quality of the persuasive writings. The most powerful single predictor was the degree to which participants were able to recognize and reconcile divergent traits in others. Quality ratings of the expository essays were more adequately predicted by composition length, though multiple regression indicated an additional contribution attributable to social cognitive ability. Results tend to confirm the position that social cognition is most important in persuasive writing, but do not support a strong disclaimer of the role of audience awareness in nonsuasive discourse. The notion of audience awareness commands a central position in composition theory, research, and instruction. (See recent reviews by Ede, 1984; Kroll, 1984; Rubin, 1984b). Proficient writers attend to the broad rhetorical dimensions including audience of their writing task, while nonproficient writers show a compulsive attention to matters of surface correctness (Flower & Hayes, 1980; Perl, 1979. While current research shows some of the ways in which good writers attend to matters of audience through specific discourse features (Rafoth, 1985; Rubin & Pliche, 1979), there is conThis research was supported by a grant from the University of Cieorgia Research Foundation to the first author. The authors express appreciation to John O'Looney for assistance in data analysis. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1986

Stylistic analysis of scientific and technical prose reveals that technical and non-technical expository prose share a number of common characteristics; consequently, common assumptions about a clear stylistic separation between scientific and literary writing are faulty. Technical prose, moreover, possesses a number of rhetorical features which further increase its likeness to literary writing. Both style and rhetoric of technical writing thus point toward non-referential functions in scientific discourse, including the operation of significant cultural codes.

Metaphor is best conceived not as a textual feature, but as a product of readers responding to texts. In technical discourse, metaphors help readers perform certain physical and mental operations. The technical metaphor can be classified by how it specifically helps readers perform these tasks, that is, by its purpose and method. The technical metaphor can 1) name parts, stressing space; 2) denote actions, stressing time; 3) denote qualities, stressing neither time nor space; or 4) create models, stressing both time and space.

Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism. By George A. Kennedy. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Figures of Literary Discourse. By Gérard Genette. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Intro. Marie‐Rose Logan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Some instructions for a coffee mill fail to take the reader's common sense seriously and so violate some basic rules for communication, called speech act rule. When the instructions violate the rules, the reader either gets confused or feels justified to stop reading. By writing the instructions this way, the company tried to protect itself from lawsuits. It is shown that these instructions do nothing about liability. The better, less expensive, and only way to write instructions is to respect the reader's common sense.

This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of are manifested in writing. I use the term here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between awareness, which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and adaptation, which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled audience and reader and response to the larger rhetorical problem were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion attention to the specific needs of the audience. This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

Responses to one poem, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, were studied using repertory grid technique. Twenty-one undergraduate stu- dents of English literature participated. A significant commonality in response was found within the grids, suggesting that for this group of readers a number of invariant features in the poem were determining response. The grids also brought to light individual differences in approach to the poem, which were explored during interviews with each student. Grid technique thus offers a method for mapping the boundary between individual and common features in literary response. A major tradition in literary studies has argued that a literary text offers one correct reading which all well-informed and sufficiently sensitive read- ers can be expected to discover. Recent arguments have undermined the authority of this approach: Fish (1980, p. 13), for instance, finds the author- ity of the text secondary to that of the interpretive community in determin- ing a given reader's response. One recent reader of Fish has taken him to imply that any reading of a literary work is acceptable (Eagleton, 1983, p. 85). Behind this debate lies an obvious but important theoretical point. To what extent does a given literary work constrain individual readings? Does a work's structure as a whole, for example, tend to determine the way in which its parts will be understood? Or is the work open at any point to influences originating outside the boundary of the text? Clearly, texts cannot be divorced from the language and culture in which they are written and read; but it might be postulated that a work of literature is distinguishable from other types of discourse by its possession of a structure of meaning internal to the text, and that this tends to direct the responses of all com- petent readers. To be specific: two or more elements within a text may be amenable to a variety of interpretations, according to the disposition or experience of indi- vidual readers; for example, I may enjoy Donne's attitude toward women, my neighbor may detest it. But if, despite such response differences, inter- pretations of particular elements in the poem show systematic relationships to each other across all readings, it may be argued that the text exhibits an internal structure that is determining response. In studying this question Groeben's (1980) distinction between text mean- ing and text sense is helpful. We may postulate that a given work has a

This study investigated the relationships among features of textual cohesion, as identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976), and primarytrait assessments of writing quality and coherence, with manuscript length held statistically constant. A random sample of 493 persuasive papers written by 17-year-olds during the 1978-79 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing evaluation were analyzed. The results of the analyses indicate that general coherence is an important element of writing quality and that the lexical cohesive features of synonym, hyponym, and collocation are important elements of writing quality and general coherence in manuscripts of the same length. When Alexander Bain (1867) first categorized prose discourse into four discourse modes, he stipulated that quality in each mode consisted of the elements of unity, mass (later known as emphasis), and coherence. Conners (1981) notes that Bain's ideas greatly influenced composition instruction in this country until 1950 but have waned since then, giving way to conceptualizations of written discourse that place increased emphasis on the contexts for writing (e.g., Kinneavy, 1971) and the processes that writers use to produce writing within varying contexts (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1980). Clearly, these emphases now permeate all levels of practice and theory. Yet Bain's notion of coherence still holds sway, as Bamberg (1983) points out: Coherence is generally accepted as a 'sine qua non' in written discourse. Oddly, little research has been conducted to determine the relationship between writing quality and coherence, an important relationship because coherence is often used to identify the strengths and weaknesses in student writing. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 1980a) hypothesized that the apparent drop in the writing abilities of 13and 17-year-olds between the first national writing assessment (196970) and the second (1974-75) was due in part to a drop in the number of coherent paragraphs. However, at that time NAEP had no way of empirically determining whether this assertion was accurate. In an effort to determine if coherence in student writing was indeed declining, NAEP (1980a) constructed a primary-trait coherence measure (referred to as a cohesion measure by NAEP) for use in the third national writing assessment (1978-79). Scores on this measure were shown to have the same degree of reliability as scores on primary-trait measures of writing quality. What differed was the focus of the assessment. The primary-trait Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

In this study, the effects of writing ability and mode of discourse of cognitive capacity engagement were investigated. Sixty-three college freshmen of varying writing abilities (basic, average, and honors) were randomly assigned to experimental treatments (descriptive writing, narrative writing, and persuasive writing). Using the secondary task method, it was found that writing ability differentially affects cognitive capacity engagement across modes. For example, honors writers were least engaged when writing descriptive essays but were most engaged when writing persuasive essays whereas average writers were most engaged when writing descriptive essays but were least engaged when writing narrative essays. Analytic quality scores and engagement were related and results were interpreted in the context of schema theory to estimate the learning potential of a given mode of discourse. Also, engagement and syntactic complexity treasures were related. It was found that as words per clause increased, engagement also increased; whereas, as clauses per T-unit increased, engagement decreased.

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.

Though historical scholarship in technical writing has been sparse, what is available on Francis Bacon has tended to focus on Bacon's influence in directing scientific discourse toward the use of plain prose. This article shows that in many ways, Bacon's theory of rhetoric for specialized, knowledge-seeking fields directly conflicts with that of those who support plain prose for these fields. In addition, the rhetorical method Bacon utilized in presenting the theory has subverted the effect of much of his theory. Consequently, it is not surprising that Bacon's actual theory differs both from what was transferred to the Royal Society and from posterity's interpretation of it.

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.

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.

Research Article| February 01 1985 Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse Edited by Robert J. Connors,Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 291pp. Susan Miller Susan Miller University Writing Program, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, U.S.A. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1985) 3 (1): 71–75. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.1.71 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Susan Miller; Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Rhetorica 1 February 1985; 3 (1): 71–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.1.71 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1985, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1985 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Up until the publication of Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric in 1866, most American college textbook rhetorics were organized around belletristic discourse classifications; that is, they divided up the subject of writing into established literary forms such as orations, history, romance, treatises, sermons, and the like. Bain's textbook brought about what we now, thanks to Thomas Kuhn, refer to as a paradigm shift, sweeping away these belletristic schemes and substituting five forms-Description, Narration, Exposition, Persuasion, and Poetry-that, with the exception of Poetry, have survived up to the present in Freshman Composition and are known in the trade as the Modes of Discourse. 1 In recent years, however, another paradigm shift has been taking place, and Bain is now often held responsible for the impoverishment of rhetoric in the late nineteenth century.2 Regrettably, in the campaign to undo the damage he did, little attention has been paid to his intellectual milieu or to the question of why he did what he did, with the result that the true historical importance of the modes has been obscured. The most noteworthy feature of Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric-and the reason perhaps for its popularity among his contemporaries-may be its reliance upon the scientific thought of the day. During the previous century in Bain's native Scotland, Adam Smith, George Campbell, Hugh Blair and Joseph Priestley had sought to redefine the basic aims of rhetoric, largely in an effort to accommodate the increasingly prestigious natural sciences. As Wilbur Samuel Howell has argued, the classical rhetorical systems offered little guidance to the scientist in presenting his discoveries to the learned community and to the public at large: they conceived of persuasion as an appeal to commonplaces rather than facts, they depended for methods of proof on the logic of deduction rather than induction, they encouraged the use of ornamental figurative devices rather than plain statements, and in general they were designed for popular exhortation rather than for disseminating fresh knowledge.3 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke points the way to-

Abstract Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984). 291 pages. Student Writers at Work: The Bedford Prizes, edited by Nancy Sommers and Donald McQuade (Boston: Bedford Books, 1984). James M. McCrimmon, Writing With a Purpose, 8th edition by Joseph F. Trimmer and Nancy I. Sommers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 752 pp. Joyce S. Steward and Marjorie Smelstor, Writing in the Social Sciences. Scott, Foresman and Company, 1984. 340 pages.

In its classical formulation, invention is the canon that provides a rhetorician with more or less systematic procedures for finding argu- ments appropriate to the rhetorical occasion that faces her. In most of the composition textbooks written by influential nineteenth-century teachers of writing, however, invention is either greatly transformed from its classical guise or is slighted altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century most popular composition textbooks written in the vein now described as current-traditional treat invention as a means of systematically delimiting an area of thought in order that the writer may handle its exposition in discourse with maximum clarity. 1 In what follows I trace the evolution-or better, devolution-of the inventional procedure recommended by influential composition texts written during the last half of the nineteenth century, and follow its course into our own century. The term evolution is of course metaphorical; however the continuity and development of the inventional tradition I am tracing is remarkably homogeneous. The first-generation authors in the tradition-Alexander Jamieson, Samuel Newman, H. N. Day, and Alex- ander Bain are among the best known-cite and use the work of British rhetoricians George Campbell or Hugh Blair, while members of the second generation-John Franklin Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, Bar- rett Wendell, Fred Newton Scott, and Joseph V. Denney-generally acknowledge at least Bain, Genung, and Day. And after 1900 until about 1940, Wendell and Scott and Denney are the authoritative names in the tradition; they are as routinely cited in early twentieth-century textbooks as were Blair and Campbell in nineteenth-century works. Early nineteenth-century American school rhetoric is an amalgam of classical and eighteenth-century discourse theory. No American rhetoric text had yet succeeded in creating a satisfactory blend of the epistemological rhetoric formulated by George Campbell in his influen- tial Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and the Ciceronian rhetoric imparted by such popular works as John Ward's System of Oratory (1759).2 Alexander Jamieson's popular Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Litera- ture (1818) nicely represents the confusion of traditions which obtained in the early part of the century.3 Jamieson opens his treatise with a discussion of language which is an imitation of Hugh Blair's treatment of 146

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.

Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).

In Philosophy in a New Key Susanne Langer writes of the great generative ideas that periodically arise to transform our intellectual enterprises by changing the very terms in which we frame our questions and conceive our purposes. When one of these concepts bursts into consciousness, we cannot at first view it critically, because it is the nature of a key change to possess us with its compelling new vision of the world. For some time afterwards we are absorbed in exploiting the energizing, fertilizing power of the new idea, which seems limitless in its implications and applications. Only later, as a paradigm matures, can we begin to refine and correct its key concept and to achieve the critical distance necessary to recognize its bounds. We are approaching this moment in composition, which has taken process as its generative theme for over a decade. By keying composition studies to writers' thought processes and the relations between cognition and language, this theme has restored to the field what was lost with the decline of rhetoric: a genuinely rich, humanly significant, and inexhaustible object of inquiry. In the next stage of our development as a discipline, we need to take up a more critical attitude toward process theory, to probe its limits and to articulate and address some of the conceptual problems it leaves unresolved. I would like to make a contribution to that work in this essay. My starting point is the difficulty of handling textual issues-for example, matters of style or discourse form-within the process framework. That framework has no principled way to account for the role of texts in discourse events because it was constituted initially by a contrastive opposition between composing (dynamic process) and texts (inert product). Texts were therefore rejected as proper objects of inquiry in composition. I suggest we might resolve this problem and work toward a more comprehensive theory of discourse by developing concepts on the principle of integrating text and process at all levels of analysis.

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(1984). The birth of molecular biology: An essay in the rhetorical criticism of scientific discourse. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 70-83.

With the rise of science, 18th-century logic and rhetoric began to make use of inductive patterns of discourse. In logic, William Duncan discussed two methods of organizing extended discourse, the methods of analysis and synthesis. Analysis represents the movement of thought as the thinker or writer works through a problem to discover its solution. This method is actually an early form of what is now known as problem solving that Joseph Priestley, a rhetorician as well as a scientist, introduced into rhetoric. He uses analysis in his scientific writing, especially in his Experiments on Different Kinds of Air, in the form of a five-stage mental operation or heuristic that records the progress of his thoughts as he experimented on air to isolate and identify oxygen.

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.

Verbal Style and the Presidency: A Computer‐Based Analysis. By Roderick P. Hart. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, Inc., 1984. The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Winifred Bryan Horner, Editor. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizxng of the Word. By Walter J. Ong, S. J. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

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.

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L'analyse de seize ecrits en provenance de l'industrie et seize en provenance de la recherche met en evidence le haut niveau d'abstration des bons documents techniques

Abstract In their writings about one of the most important cornerstones in the edifice of psychoanalysis, Freud's interpretation of his Irma Dream, Freud and Erikson act as apologists for the modern patriarchy. Using the rhetorical persona of the progressive, scientific hero, Freud and Erikson cast themselves as protagonists in the drama of modernization. Their rhetorical structures, syntax, and diction reveal their sexism. The strategy of their discourses invites their audience to believe that the audience is witnessing scientific discoveries in the making; the rhetoric of Freud and Erikson suggests that their discourse is not patriarchal rationalization, but rational analysis, the drama of the scientific method applied for progress. Their interpretation of Freud's Irma Dream disassociates Freud from women, assigning separate behaviors for rational, progressive males and irrational, traditional females. But the truth of the Irma Dream is that it associates Freud with females and reveals the irresponsibility of both his pharmacological and psychological prescriptions.

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In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition at Colorado State University wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, STYLE, and SPELL, programs developed by Bell Laboratories. Studies at Bell Laboratories have shown that technical writers using these programs not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. This study tests for similar improvement in college writing and editing skills and also measures effects of computer assistance on attitudes toward writing. Our tests suggest that textual analysis with computers intrigues college writers and speeds learning of editing skills by offering immediate, reliable, and consistent attention to surface features of their prose. Most freshmen writers have had little practice editing their own written work so little that wordy expressions, faulty diction, and spelling errors increasingly mar even their most careful composition. Bedeviled by these and other problems of young writers, we began exploring ways of using word-processing technology and computers to help students analyze and edit their own writing before handing it in for marking. While we were preparing a computerized diction list, reports reached us about Bell Laboratories' extraordinary editing software Writer's Workbench (Macdonald, 1980; Cherry, 1981, 1982; Cherry & Vesterman, 1981; Frase, et al., 1981; Macdonald, et al., 1982). Discovering our parallel interests, Colorado State University and Bell Laboratories began discussions leading to a research exchange permitting CSU to test and adapt Writer's Workbench for teaching composition. During these negotiations, CSU leased the three Workbench programs then available. In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, and STYLE. Also included in the test was SPELL, Bell Laboratories' spelling checker distributed with the computer we used for the experiment. Studies at Bell Laboratories (Gingrich, et al., 1981) have shown that technical writers using Writer's Workbench not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. What might the effect be on college writers? Few would doubt the value of students correcting their own spellResearch in the Teaching of English, Vol. 17, No. 3, October 1983