Almost every discussion of technical or scientific writing style mentions the passive voice as a stylistic choice to avoid. However, the passive voice does have legitimate uses in technical and scientific writing--the problem is to define the appropriate or effective uses and the inappropriate or ineffective ones. An examination of passive voice…

Reviews the grammatical, semantic, and stylistic difficulties in translating English passive constructions into French. (AM)

"Writeability" is concerned with helping writers and editors produce materials on easier readability levels. A major input of most readability formulas is vocabulary difficulty. One way to increase readability is to use simple vocabulary or shorter words since word frequency studies show that more common words are shorter. The other…

Although the nature of topicalization is complex and cannot be easily separated from considerations of syntactic structure and sentence focus, analysis of language usage has indicated that topicalization is more a stylistic than a syntactic process. Topicalization refers to moving a noun phrase (NP) into the initial position of a sentence.…

Earlier sociolinguistic studies distinguish between Standard English and Black English with respect to indirect question formation. Standard English typically does not invert the tense-marker "do" in the imbedded question ("Ask John if he played basketball today") while Black English does ("Ask John did he play basketball today"). In fact, the…

An examination of the stylistic differences among writing from literary specialists, from science, and from social science shows that a more precise diagnosis of the writing problems of clarity and coherence is possible. Ten randomly selected paragraphs from each of four publications, the "Canadian Medical Association Journal," the "Canadian…

Stylistics, the art of making effective choices in writing, depends on synonymy. This means that writers, depending on the purpose, the audience, and the context of their messages, will rephrase those messages to improve their effectiveness. Paraphrasing messages to fit the needs of particular situations depends on a number of stylistic variables…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)

Since clauses are the largest functional components of a sentence, their analysis can increase attention to sentence structure and stylistic variation. Students can learn to distinguish main clause types by naming the verb forms used (transitive, intransitive, equational, and passive). Once students have mastered the recognition of main clauses,…

Researchers in many disciplines dislike writing and view it as an additional and unnecessary irritant. Teaching researchers to write for administrators who must make decisions about highly specialized topics, but who lack the specialist's knowledge, means inducing a change in the researchers' perspective. They have to learn that they are writing…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

In recent years, T-unit analysis has been applied in second language research to characterize the syntactic nature of linguistic input and to assess the syntactic maturity of the learners' written production. This measure has been seen to provide an objective and reliable method of determining the overall complexity of language samples. However,…

Right dislocations are expressions of the following form: (1) "They told the Grand Jury a number of lies, the Nixon men." (2) "We find we have to limit our social schedule, my husband and I." (3) "Mary always wears a frown, the ugly witch." They are found also almost exclusively in the spoken language. This paper…

Seven people who both write and read various kinds of reports in their professions were asked to read and respond to identical sets of student reports over a four-month period in order to determine whether they responded to personae. Attached to each unevaluated and unidentified student report was a form with 15 different response areas that…