Presents an original description of the psychological processes involved in producing speech. (AM)

The reader-centered emphasis dominating the current literature reflects an assumption that what is learned from text, and how much is learned, is determined primarily by the reader. An alternative thesis, however, is that much of the responsibility for text comprehensibility may lie with the producer of the text. That is, the text needs to be…

Points out that writing errors of journalism students can result from faulty thought patterns involving thinking in sentence fragments, personifying objects, using bureaucratic abstractions, and condensing complex ideas; examines ways of dealing with bureaucratic coding and compressed sentences. (Conclusion of a two-part article.) (GT)

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…

Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind…

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…

As human understanding is largely metaphorical, what metaphor is, how children use it, and how they can be taught to use it more effectively are important educational concerns. A direct or indirect comparison between two apparently unlike things, metaphor consists of a topic, a vehicle of comparison, and ground--or traits--linking the topic and…