This article discusses the recommendations made by compositionists to import the findings of linguistics into composition instruction during the middle years of the twentieth century. The article classifies these recommendations for the uses of linguistics into three kinds: (1) improvement of instruction in grammar and usage; (2) enhancement of students' syntactic and stylistic repertoires; and (3) an aid to invention. Utilizing this history, the article argues that while linguistics can offer teachers of composition some assistance in matters that are proper to linguistic investigation and analysis, the noncontextual orientation of modern linguistics renders it insufficient as a comprehensive source of theoretical or practical assistance in composition instruction.

Linguists and philosophers have traditionally argued that definite constructions presuppose familiarity on the part of the addressee. This article examines empirically the question of what kind of familiarity, in the context of newspaper editorials, this might be. A significant issue, articulated by literacy theorist Walter Ong, is the nature of the reader and whether a writer can know what a reader is familiar with. Taking a case study approach, the author examines definite constructions in 15 editorial articles from the Christian Science Monitor. These constructions are classified, following Brown and Yule (1983), as either re-evoking, new, or inferrable. It is argued that for purposes of studying the writer-reader relationship, the inferrables are most interesting since they indicate what the writer believes the reader is capable of inferring. Ultimately both the new and the inferrable show that writers use definite constructions in accord with genre conventions. The author concludes that such conventions make communication efficient.

This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).

The author reviews the research on the effectiveness of graphics in instruction and then proposes a framework for developing a theory that accounts for the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of graphics. His goal is to lay the groundwork for developing prescriptive guidelines for the design of effective graphics in training documents. He stresses that further research needs to be done in order that a theory of learning from graphics can be developed in sufficient detail for design prescriptions to be provided and that prescriptive theory for graphic design is necessary.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

While writing teachers view the résumé as a sophisticated rhetorical chal lenge, students tend to see it as a "technical specification"of their employment qualifications. This study investigated the reader's perspective by examining how writing features influence recruiters' assessments of résumés. Eighteen recruiters rated 72 résumés describing fictitious mechanical-engineering stu dents. Four résumé features were systematically varied: relevance of previous work experience, elaboration ofindependent coursework, stylistic quality, and mechanical correctness. The major result suggests that technical work experi ence is important but not sufficient: If the résumés of technically well- qualified applicants contained grammatical errors, recruiters rated these résumés lower than résumés listing less experience but containing more accu rate writing.1

Of all the bruising confrontations between the capitalist and communist power blocks perhaps none was so staggering as the Cuban missile crisis. Most Americans patriotically rallied around our determined young president in this great moment of crisis, but there were other Americans who spoke with a different voice then who presumed to disagree with the dominant opinion. These were the voices from the left, now the old left. Their rhetorical response is my subject. By concentrating on several specimens written from a leftist perspective in response to a single event, I create a framework for analyzing the discourse of an ideology to demonstrate the influence of that ideology on and argument, together with the usefulnesses of an analytic method. Antecedent to this analysis are particular considerations about style, argument and method which lead to other considerations peculiar to the relation of political discourse to the world. Because the event focused opinion strongly, and time gives perspective, I have chosen written and oral reactions to the Cuban missile crisis. In addition to selections of written from three leftist newspapers, the National Guardian, The Weekly People, and The Catholic Worker, I have included speech samples on the same topic from Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, as a contrast to the rhetoric of the left. To analyze this discourse I use Walker Gibson's style machine as he calls it developed to account for distinctions...in the voices addressing (115), distinctions which he breaks down into tough, sweet and stuffy talkers. Gibson's machine, consisting of sixteen grammatical-rhetorical qualities, is appended (A). Other available descriptions or classifications of or argument are Huntington Brown's deliberative, expository and prophetic, Edwin Black's exhortation and argument, and Aristotle's topics. Brown and Black analyze thought methodology with some consideration of style. The neo-Aristotelians, on the other hand, consider and thought combined into argumentative methods. I follow the classical topics in considering rhetorical argument (Rhetoric chs. 22, 23, 24; Corbett 94-132). My particular assumptions are that belief influences style, that while prose styles can be typed individual differences remain, that includes varieties of diction, syntax, and argument Further, I seek an attitude towards language, an attitude, however, influenced not by cultural or individual psychology, but by political belief. Because political writers argue, their arguments common to all rhetoric can also be typed. Argument creates patterns which shapes. For Gibson is a matter of sheer individual will, a desire for a particular kind of self-definition no matter what the circumstances (24). Political belief can condition will. For both Marie H. Nichols (75), and Edwin Black (Persona) reveals distinctive political personalities. In selecting a usable analytical methodology I had either to invent my own, or use an existing one. I chose Gibson's because we share similar concerns. I want to know what kind of voice speaks. What does the use of that voice imply? How do I determine trust? I also want to know the attitude of that voice towards subject and audience. If Gibson can help to answer these questions, then I accept his work saving the necessity of inventing yet another method, concentrating instead on the results produced. In general, stylistics seems more of a discourse on method than on results. Although we want to know what ails us, naming is not enough. To know that Dorothy Day talks tough does not suffice. We know there are other names than tough, sweet or stuffy. The point is not just to label, but to penetrate into the thought behind the voice aided by a given point of view. Gibson describes his work as primitive. Primitive, yet legitimate because applied he yields insight His method reveals attitude just as psychiatric categories, which might also be called primitive, reveal motive. If the arguments which pattern are traditional and discernible, their correlations with are not as clear. The advertiser, for example, speaks sweetly with recognizably dubious argument. Those political voices purring and storming at us must also be judged by how they argue so their trustworthiness can be determined. We can uncover falsehood by showing how a statement varies from reality--plain lying. We can discover understanding of mental illness by probing the discordance the aberrant mind creates

The mature writer is recognized ... by his ability to create a flow of sentences, a pattern of thought that is produced, one suspects, according to the principles of yet another kind of grammara grammar, let us say, of passages. Mina ShaughnessyRichard M. Coe has developed such a grammar, one which uses a simple graphic instrument to analyze the meaningful relationships between sentences in a passage and to clarify the function of structure in discourse. Working in the tradition of Christensen s generative rhetoric, Coe presents a two-dimensional graphic matrix that effectively analyzes the logical relations between statements by mapping coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate relationships.Coe demonstrates the power of his discourse matrix by applying it to a variety of significant problems, such as how to demonstrate discourse differences between cultures (especially between Chinese and English), how to explain precisely what is bad about the structure of passages that do not work, and how best to teach structure. This new view of the structure of passages helps to articulate crucial questions about the relations between form and function, language, thought and culture, cognitive and social processes.

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Introspection suggests that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonation, accents, and hesitations. The suggestion here is that certain important aspects of this “covert prosody” of written language are reflected in punctuation. In order to study systematically the degree to which punctuation reflects the covert prosody of written language, one would like to find independent ways of uncovering that prosody. Two such ways are explored here: reading aloud and “repunctuating” (inserting punctuation in passages from which the author's punctuation has been removed). The article focuses especially on the relation between “punctuation units” (stretches of language between punctuation marks) and the “intonation units” of speech, and the variations in this relation that are found among different authors and different styles. It explores the degree to which different pieces of writing are prosodically spokenlike, and the degree to which they capture the prosodic imagery of ordinary readers. “Close” and “open” punctuation are discussed, as are selected grammatical sites at which there is a discrepancy between punctuation and prosody. It is suggested that an awareness of prosodic imagery is an important ingredient of “good writing.”

Winifred Bryan Homer, Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xvii + 462 pages. Ira Shor, ed., Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1987. Afterword by Paulo Freire. 237 pages. Erika Lindemann, Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1984–1985. Longman, 1987. xviii + 318 pages. Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1986. Longman, 1988. xv + 249 pages. Richard M. Coe, Toward a Grammar of Passages. CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 123 pages.

Linguistics has been largely misunderstood in writing pedagogy. After Chomsky's revolution, it was widely touted as a panacea; now it is widely flogged as a pariah. Both attitudes are extreme. It has a number of applications in the writing classroom, and it is particularly ripe for technical writing students, who have more sophistication with formalism than their humanities counterparts. Moreover, although few scholars outside of linguistics are aware of it, Transformational Grammar is virtually obsolete; most grammatical models are organized around principled aversions to the transformation, and even Chomsky has little use for his most famous innovation these days. Among the more recent developments is Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, a model with distinct formal and pedagogical advantages over Chomsky's early transformational work.

When writers make frequent grammatical errors, they often spend a substantial part of composing time making decisions about grammar. Studies of unskilled writers with normal hearing indicate this hyperconcern for correctness. There have been reasons to believe, however, that the attention of deaf writers who make errors is less consumed by grammatical decision making. The present study was undertaken to determine whether representative deaf writers devote as much attention to grammatical decisions as unskilled hearing subjects. Ten deaf subjects and five hearing subjects wrote and edited accounts of two short stories that were signed and spoken on videotape. Under all composing conditions, the deaf subjects' rates of pausing were substantially lower than those of the hearing writers. Combined with subjects' patterns of error correction, these findings suggest that the deaf subjects devoted substantially less attention to grammatical decision making during composition.

Four types of quick references (small, portable packages of information) are described: slide rules, syntax summaries, informational guides, and posters and templates. Their design is discussed, covering the use of white space, type legibility, logical organization, inclusion of relevant information only, information accessibility, and effective headings.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Findings from a comparison of undergraduate and on-the-job writers recommend some changes in traditional methods of teaching technical writing in college. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and “competent” writers in business and industry were given the same composing task. The writing of the employees showed telling and sometimes unexpected differences in a wide variety of areas, in length, vocabulary, organization, specificity, coherence, sentence formation, and surface error. Implied is increased attention to several general writing skills: compression of meaning, fluency of expression, efficiency in techniques of coherence, expandability of organization and syntax, and rhetorical maneuverability and adaptability.

The purposes of this study were to identify the types of misspellings made in student writing during the first eight years of school, to determine at what grade level these problems emerged, and to identify any developmental changes in the kinds of errors committed over the years. Among some of the important findings were the facts that the total number of spelling errors increases from the first grade through the fourth and then begins to decline. The deletion of letters is by far the major problem area, accounting for practically 40% of the errors throughout the eight years. Although the percentage of vowel deletions declines steadily, the percentage of consonant deletions, even though erratic, remains relatively high. The article concludes with an explanation of the results and ideas for future research.

The author's grading strategy in an upper-division technical writing course is documented. Students taking the course plan technical communication careers. They complete 50 pages of editing exercises and generate more than 75 pages of double-spaced copy for eight assignments. The author responds to students' work in several ways: (1) personalized memos and extended handwritten comments, (2) marginal handwritten comments and questions, (3) internal copyediting of student manuscripts, (4) individual conferences, and (5) assignment of a grade. When editing student assignments, criticism is provided of content, communication effectiveness, and appearance. For content, the accuracy, consistency, logic, and evidence are evaluated. For communication effectiveness, the appropriateness of the narrative and visuals for the audiences, organization, clarity, and conciseness are evaluated, and for appearance, checks are made for spelling, mechanics, stylebook, and format errors.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Grammar errors and style weaknesses identified by CRITIQUE, a text processing system developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, are discussed. Linguistic criteria for distinguishing between grammar and style are drawn first. These criteria are reflected in the messages issued by CRITIQUE to the user. Then, a computational criterion for distinguishing between grammar and style is discussed. This criterion is reflected in the implementation of the grammar-checking and style-checking mechanisms. Finally, it is explained how CRITIQUE operates when the criteria are in conflict: the implementation is driven by the computational criterion, while the display to the user remains faithful to the linguistic criteria.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

A Comprehensive grammar of the English language , A Comprehensive grammar of the English language , کتابخانه دانشگاه علوم پزشکی و خدمات بهداشتی درمانی کرمان

This study surveyed recruiter, teacher, and student groups to determine the following: attitudes about cover letters and resumes, reasons to reject cover letters and resumes, the contents of the ideal cover letter and where specific information should occur in it, and the importance of various categories of the resume and contents of the ideal resume. The results indicate that 1) limited time is spent in processing cover letters and resumes; 2) the length of a cover letter and resume should be one page; 3) spelling errors, poor grammar, and poor organization are key problems in cover letters and resumes; 4) specific jobs wanted, career goals, and personal information are the most important factors of a cover letter; 5) job objectives/career goals, employment history, and educational history are the most important parts of the resume. Specific differences in attitudes among recruiters, teachers, and students are discussed in this article.

Two studies investigated the editing strategies used by college basic writing (BW) students as they went about correcting sentence-level errors in controlled editing tasks. One study involved simple word processing, and a second involved an interactive editor that supplemented the word-processing program, giving students feedback on their correction attempts and helping them focus on the errors. In both studies BW students showed two clearly different editing strategies, a consulting strategy in which grammatical rules were consulted and an intuiting strategy in which the sound of the text was assessed for “goodness” in a rather naturalistic way. Students consistently used their intuiting strategies more effectively; however, errors requiring consulting strategies showed a larger improvement after intervention by the interactive editor. Cognitive implications of the editing strategies are discussed in terms of the requisite knowledge involved in successful application of each strategy.

Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

Intuitively all users of language understand whether a unit of discourse is cohesive, whether it makes sense. Markels seeks to formalize some of this innate knowledge about discourse by describing some of the textual cues that contribute to cohesion in particular types of English paragraphs. Focusing on expository paragraphs, she investigates the semantic relations among nouns necessary to create noun chains and the syntactic information necessary to invest those chains with Other researchers have investigated cohesion only as a semantic phenomenon, but by pursuing this new approach, Markels gives equal weight to syntax. She points out that while noun chains establish semantic consistency only the interaction of those chains with syntactic information that thematizes them can create Markels identifies and describes four common patterns through which paragraphs achieve cohesion or unity. In describing these cohesion patterns, she also identifies paragraph structures based on semantic and syntactic relationships that produce cohesion.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

This pilot study investigated relationships between individual differences in levels of writing skills and proficiencies at simultaneous and successive cognitive processing. Data from a group of 46 subjects indicate that scores on successive processing tasks were able to predict final grades in an introductory English composition course (p&lt;.01). This suggested both the possibility and importance of investigating further how simultaneous and (especially) successive processing relate to writing skills. With three subjects used for pilot data, low scores in successive processing showed relationships with sentence-level errors and with the ability to develop sequences of ideas in writing. Low scores in simultaneous processing correlated with an inability to indicate clear relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Planning, a third cognitive factor, was found to be a powerful influence in organizing content. In the interaction of planning and simultaneous processing, lack of planning ability may interfere with the writer's ability to survey and thus organize his or her material.

A description is given of software currently available for analyzing and editing the style of word-processed documents, usually those written by nonprofessional communicators. The packages covered are Grammatik II, Rightwriter, Punctuation and Style, Electric Webster, and PC style.

The teaching of English grammar in the nineteenth century can be a rewarding subject of study because it reveals attitudes toward language and language teaching that also shaped the pedagogy of rhetoric, composition, and literature during that period. The prescriptive attitude toward grammar and usage inherited from the eighteenth century was a powerful determinant both in grammar teaching and in the teaching of speaking, reading, and writing, where taste, facility, precision, and perspicuity (clarity) were central issues. And when continental notions of inductive (we would say progressive) teaching begin to have an effect on American education, the signs of change appear earliest in the school grammar texts. In this essay I will describe the main strands of theory and practice in early nineteenth-century grammar teaching and then show how these analytic and synthetic approaches were combined in grammar texts around the middle of the century, contributing to an eclectic theory of expression employed in both grammar and composition teaching by the 1890s.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship of student attitude using graphic enhanced versus nongraphic enhanced computer-based instruction. Four intact groups were randomly assigned treatment. Two groups received graphic instruction and two groups received nongraphic computer-based instruction. An attitude questionnaire was administered to evaluate student attitude toward the graphic and nongraphic computer-based instruction. Results of t-tests indicated there was no significant difference in attitude scores between graphic and nongraphic treatment groups at the .05 level.

It is good form in English Department offices and corridors to grump, grouse, growl, even whine about how the is going. Such labor, such a dreary business, how grubby, how ridiculous to expect publication, as if an article could reveal the subtleties of a finely-tuned mind. The more you publish, the more tactful it is to moan and groan. The danger is that young colleagues, new to the academy, may believe us. They may think that we who publish are performing penance, obediently fulfilling a vow to publish out of fear of perishing, when this academic, and others, will slyly look around to see who is listening, then confess, writing is fun. The focus is on writing. That is where writers discover they know more than they knew they knew, where accidents of diction or syntax reveal meaning, where sentences run ahead to expose a thought. If the is done, publication-perhaps not this piece but the next or the one after that-will follow. And publishing promises a lifetime of exploration and learning, active memberhip in a scholarly community, and the opportunity for composition teachers to practice what we preach. I will share some of the methods that have helped me publish what some would say-and have said-is an excessive number of articles and books on composing processes. I do not do this to suggest that others should work as I work, but as a way to invite others who publish to reveal their own craft so those who join our profession can become productive members of it-and share the secret pleasure in which we feel but rarely admit.

Some theoreticians and practitioners view editing as a superficial task, often no more than the mindless following of a set of prescriptive rules for grammar, syntax, and style. In addition, the editor-author relationship is typically perceived as an interaction between an editor and words. However, drawing upon rhetoric and cognitive psychology, I argue in this article for the complexity and importance of the editing process and the writer-editor relationship. This perspective is tentatively supported by a study of the revising and editing patterns of professional and experienced writers. The study suggests that revising and editing may be equally complex tasks. Further, the complexity increases if editors and authors discuss their changes as opposed to legislating them. Several methods for imparting this perspective and related knowledge to students are discussed.

Most technical writing texts contain grammar reviews, but few supply more than prescriptive rules to correct persistent examples of unclear writing. To provide a more progressive approach to grammatical analysis, this article applies the non-prescriptive constructs of modern grammar to the recurrent problem of faulty pronoun reference. Grammatical problems often arise because pronouns serve both as form-class and as structure-class words, because they often must agree in case, person, gender, and number with antecedents, and because the pronoun it is often misunderstood as an expletiv. The author suggests that small, problem-oriented doses of modern grammar may help students and professionals alike to better understand the intricacies of textual English.

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

Teachers of writing have currently been showing an interest in error analysis, a device that has been used informally for some time but has received serious attention from linguists and language teaching methodologists only recently. This interest in error analysis seems strange because this type of analysis possesses many of the characteristics of structuralism and few (if any) of the characteristics of tranformationalism. As a result, the objections to error analysis are partly theoretical in nature. Because the number of sentences in a language is infinite, the number of different kinds of errors that students can make is infinite or, at least, indefinitely large. Because of this, the chance of a student producing a particular sentence exhibiting a particular error is very small. This is the principal reason behind the creation of vague, general, and subsequently rather meaningless categories in the taxonomies that are used in error analysis. For this reason, it would seem to be appropriate for teachers to abandon error analysis and lead students through the use of creative language exercises into the writing of creative sentences.

Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,

Readability formulas have drawbacks when used with persons who are not fluent in English. Most such formulas depend upon the assumptions that longer words and longer sentences are more difficult than those which are not. The author asserts that these assumptions do not hold, and that there are other factors which contribute to relative difficulty when dealing with nonfluent readers. Vocabulary, sentence structure, text organization, and presentation, factors affecting readability that can be controlled by the writer, are discussed.

Proponents of computerized text-analysis (CTA) systems like Bell Laboratories' Writer's Workbench contend that the computer's analysis of a text's surface features can help students become better writers and editors. Several colleges and universities have already integrated the new technology into their writing programs, and others will consider doing so in the future. Teachers of technical writing, however, ought to investigate carefully the capabilities and limitations of CTA before applying it to the technical writing classroom. Not even the most sophisticated of today's computers can detect the basic grammar and punctuation errors that bedevil student writers. Moreover, the computer's evaluation of a text's readability and style is untrustworthy and lacks a sound theoretical and pedagogical foundation; indeed, the machine's quantitative-based analysis of writing style might do some students more harm than good. Finally, there is no empirical evidence that CTA helps students become better writers.

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.

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.

The aim of this study was to describe the development of audience-adapted writing skills between the end of elementary school and the beginning of college. Students in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11, and college freshmen, were given the task of rewriting a linguistically complex story for a young reader. Analyses of rewritten stories showed significant, agerelated decreases in mean lexical and syntactic complexity, as well as significant increases in mean reading ease. Further analyses of the alteration of difficult lexical items and rewriting of the moral of the story suggested a shift from extensive use of “word-oriented” strategies in the lower grades to increasing use of a “meaning-oriented” approach in the higher grades.

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.

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