Reports the results of analysis of revisions in 100 randomly selected sets of 12th-grade students' essay drafts. Findings revealed that there are patterns of revising strategies among the students and that these differences are associated with the quality of their writing. (HOD)

Describes the results of three experiments designed to identify cues people use to paragraph text and to determine whether those cues are semantic, formal, or both. (HOD)

Argues that, in their decision to restrict their study to surface evidence of cohesion beyond the sentence, Halliday and Hasan in "Cohesion in English" limit themselves to a discussion of meaning as it appears in surface structure. (HOD)

Analyzes a real-life writing session involving a male executive in the construction business, his female secretary, and a male representing himself as a state official, working collaboratively to write a letter to a state official urging action on a long overdue claim. Discusses the quality of the drafts and the participants' roles. (KEH)

Presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 seventh- and eighth-grade students produced in response to their science teacher's directive to describe a picture. Identifies the register elements of the task and the grammatical difficulties it posed for students. Shows that teachers can help students use grammatical resources…

Analyzes writing features conceptually linked to collectivist or individualist orientations among students from Taiwan and the United States. Notes that theses features were indirectness, personal disclosure, use of proverbs and other canonical expressions, collective self, and assertiveness. Makes comparisons across languages and nationalities…

Describes a study that developed a valid method of assessing coherence based on current linguistic theory and discourse analysis that was then used to reanalyze the "Describe" essays written by 13- and 17-year-old students for the 1969, 1973-74, and 1978-79 NAEP assessments. (HOD)

Investigates the question of T-unit length stability in informative discourse written by freshmen near the end of an intensive course in college writing. (HOD)

Investigates how writers plan to produce discourse for different purposes--to report, to generalize, to persuade--as well as how writers plan for sentence level units of language. To learn about planning, an observational measure of pause time was used. (HOD)

An analysis of descriptive and narrative passages written by 45 first-semester college freshmen early in the semester suggests that mean T-unit length is not a stable individual trait either within the descriptive mode or across description and narration. (GT)

Examined the relationship between cohesion and coherence in children's writing and investigated the degree to which this relationship would vary with quality of writing and grade level. Concludes that the relationship between cohesion and coherence did not vary according to quality of writing or grade level. (SRT)

Using essays written by twelfth grade students, a study explored the relationship of Halliday and Hasan's system for analyzing cohesion and instructors' ranking of textual coherence. (HOD)

Presents the results of an investigation of the cognitive and grammatical activities carried out by beginning and advanced college students during pauses in their writing. (HOD)

Analyzes argumentative essays written to both friendly and hostile audiences by high school seniors and college undergraduates. Finds level of intellectual development a more significant predictor of holistic paper scores than demographic variables. (MS)

Examines the structure of 100 pieces of nonnarrative writing composed by students in grades 1, 2, and 3. Analyzes the coherence in each of the pieces and the hierarchical ordering of information. Suggests the inadequacy of the term "expressive writing" to describe the initial writing done by students in the sample. (AEW)