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.

Halpern and Liggett provide a close look at several of the new communication systems, present a model of field research through which one of the new technologies is closely examined, and draw conclusions that lead to specific changes in emphasis in the teaching of They describe instructional units that introduce the new technologies in college writing classes and the results of classroom experiments in which these units were tested. Finally they define additional research questions about the new technologies and timely approaches for answering them. They highlight the role of long-term and short-term memory, show how the choice of a composing medium influences the writing process, and discuss critical differences between speaking and writing.