There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

An analysis of paragraph development in letters to the editor and in "Saturday Review and "English Journal articles suggests irrelevance of development methods taught in school. (RD)

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

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

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…

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)

To teach students how to write in a contemporary style, a secondary-school English teacher must be able to describe adequately the kind of writing he expects. Since many modern writers frequently ignore the guidelines proffered in traditional writing handbooks, the "new rhetoric"--a descriptive approach to composition that substitutes…

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…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…