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.…

Investigates whether concreteness was related to a key characteristic of written composition--the cumulative sentence with a final modifier--which has been consistently associated with higher quality writing. Supports the conceptual-peg hypothesis of dual coding theory, with concrete verbs providing the pegs on which cumulative sentences are…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

Introduces and demonstrates the various ways that writers keep track of the main theme of the exposition and how they change signals to and from subtopics to maintain continuity in texts. Concludes with notes on teaching this material. (PD)

Compares the quality and syntactic complexity of 2 types of essays written by 44 college freshmen in a basic writing course. Essays dealing with group-phenomenon events (intensification) had more words per clause, but received lower quality scores than essays dealing with individually experienced events (initiation). (PAA)

Deconstruction for reconstruction is a classroom teaching technique designed to help students improve writing skills. The objective is to write natural expanded sentences that fit in a cohesive paragraph. The technique evolved from observation of many intermediate and upper-intermediate students of English as a Second Language for whom writing…