Careful audience analysis should be a major focus of the rhetorical side of technical writing courses for university undergraduates. Student writers need to be taught to appreciate their readers' problems, interests, and motives. Most often, audience analysis is accomplished imaginatively--authors create mental images of their readers. Students…

In business correspondence and technical communications, lack of coherence can cause serious misunderstanding. This paper examines how the problem of generating coherence is addressed in English for Business and Technology textbooks. It proposes a cognitive approach to skill building and presents a teaching procedure for doing so. (Contains two…