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Writing is written within and for discourse communities, whose values, traditions, and beliefs condition the writer s own values and influence both the process of composition and the products issuing from that process.To understand how writers compose and revise within the business and industry community Broadhead and Freed examine the revision practices of proposal writers in a management-consulting firm. They describe the writers motives and intentions in changing a text. This study provides a firmly based theory of composing and revising that will enable business writers to achieve a balanced perspective by focusing on the ends as well as the means of composingthat is, by focusing on the interplay of product and process.

In most textbooks on technical writing, understandability of sentences is misleadingly equated with grammatical primitiveness. In actual technical writing, however, writers regularly conform to six basic rules dealing with the uses of base clauses and free modifiers, as well as punctuation. There are ten types of free modifiers, which can be used singly or in parallel or nonparallel sequences. All types are used either to add details to a key idea expressed in a base clause or to make transitions between one sentence or paragraph and another.