In addition to presenting the results of analyses of written texts from a linguistic perspective, this book proposes productive methods for discourse analysis and identifies new directions for work on written communication. The studies presented in the book illustrate the importance of text linguistics and discourse analysis for research on written communication. They also illustrate the value of analyzing in depth the text characteristics of particular genres, such as news stories, narratives, and problem solutions. The eight chapters and their authors are as follows: (1) "Writing in the Perspective of Speaking" (Wallace Chafee); (2) "On the Dynamics of Written Communication in the Light of the Theory of Functional Sentence Perspective" (Jan Firbas); (3) "Given and New Information and Some Aspects of the Structures, Semantics, and Pragmatics of Written Texts" (William J. Vande Kopple); (4) "Writing Processes and Written Products in Composition Research" (Stephen P. Witte and Roger D. Cherry); (5) "News Schemata" (Teun A. van Dijk); (6) "Overlapping Patterns of Discourse Organization and Their Implications for Clause Relational Analysis in Problem-Solution Texts" (Michael Hoey); (7) "The Discourse Status of Commentary" (Chaim Rabin); and (8) "Cognitive Models and Discourse Analysis" (Carl H. Frederiksen). (HTH)