Uses a linguistic analysis of a sample freshman theme to argue that the motivating context must elicit a genuine speech act, that the students must conceive of their themes as semantic units or unified wholes, and that novice writers must learn to become readers of their own writing. (AA)

The author compares some systems of the aims of discourse ranging from the Aristotelian and Aquinas schools to the Buhler, Jakobsen, and Kinneavy theories, and pleads for the preservation of the liberal arts tradition with composition as a basic course. (DS)

Presents an experimental primary trait rubric designed to assess a writer's support for an argument, and structured as an eleven-cell grid on which a rater can plot a student's score. Describes the grid, and its use in a study of 1,892 eleventh-grade essays. Also describes ways to use the grid to teach invention and arrangement. (JG)

This collection of essays on literary composition sets forth rhetorical principles formulated from a close inductive study of contemporary American prose. The first essay develops a system of analyzing sentences by structural levels and outlines a generative rhetoric for the sentence consisting of the processes of "addition,""direction of…