A study of the meanings of "generation," a popular term in current rhetorical jargon, reveals important developments in the art and theory of rhetoric. As now used, it refers without clear distinction to rule-governed, heuristic, and trial-and-error procedures. The rule-governed procedures of transformation grammar are being employed to…

Uses 24 examples to demonstrate that a comprehensive generative stylistics can provide an interlocking method for describing and teaching writing strategies. (DD)

This report contains an extensive discussion of an approach to the study of discourse. Initial remarks concern arguments for studying discourse and approaches for discourse study that have been used; the author then discusses the relationship of discourse analysis and generative semantics. Language is considered on two issues: the decisions that a…

Some suggestions as to how to transfer training from narration and description to exposition, and how to extend Christensen principles to deal with the whole composition. (Author)

Tentative conclusions were that controlled sentence practice and sentence combining can increase the overall writing effectiveness and syntactic maturity of college students in a single semester. (DD)

Describes a study which found that generative rhetoric instruction produced a quantitative and qualitative increase in college students' syntactic maturity. (DD)

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a study of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric of the sentence in enhancing the syntactic fluency of seventh graders as measured by Kellogg Hunt's normative data, and it identified demographic and syntactic features which affect student writing performance. The study involved 149 students and three…

An evaluative review of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric theory and its application to teaching freshman composition. (DS)

Argues that if the study of language is to become important again in the teaching of writing, it will be through an expanded notion of rhetoric that understands language as the site of struggle over socially produced meaning. (RAE)

This experimental, statistical study investigated the effects that Francis Christensen's "Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence" (1967) would have on overall writing quality and the number of subordinate clauses attached to the main independent clauses for more complex sentences in college freshmen's essays. In the experimental group of 42 students,…

Generative rhetoric is an essential part of any composition program or instruction in written language that begins with the preschool child and continues through the freshman year of college and beyond. Applying the principles of generative rhetoric to selected essays and student performance established the need to maintain the place of generative…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

Two articles on sentence construction and eight on the paragraph comprise this publication. Francis Christensen contributes four articles on (1) the use of loose, cumulative sentences, (2) sentence openers, with illustrations from Hemingway, (3) a generative rhetoric for the paragraph, and (4) the formation of principles of paragraph composition…

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…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: personal expressiveness in creative writing programs; generative rhetoric and writing performance; the effects of sentence combining exercises on syntactic…