For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

Presents writing as a form of dialog and the paragraph as a unit of implied dialog. (MM)

A humorous satire suggesting techniques for paragraph composition. (RD)

The principles discussed in this essay are the basis for a composition text being prepared by the author for McGraw Hill. (RY)

Offers rules and comments for using discourse analysis to teach student writers how to convert incoherent compositions into coherent, cohesive prose. (RL)

This article proposes to teach writing from the hypothesis that true writing and good prose are only end products rather than the primary objectives. The author suggests that producing an effect in a reader and revealing the self in words are prior achievements in the process of learning to write well. Criteria for judging writing are based…

Outlines how the current work in linguistics and psychology can be joined with rhetoric in the study of cohesion and suggests the ways in which this synthesis leads to both a literary and philosophical sense of form and a practical pedagogy for teachers. (MM)