In most academic writing programs worldwide, instruction aims to develop students' awareness of essay types, written language use, and test-taking strategies. However, teachers' instructional practice is often dictated by their knowledge base, perception, and the intuitions they have about language use (Borg, 2006). Such intuitions are not always…

Good sentence construction, the act of writing multiple words into sentence types that make semantic and syntactic sense, is needed for clear and meaningful written expression. The present study investigated the effects of a multi-component writing intervention, sentence instruction and frequency building to a performance criterion, on the simple…

Written expression is a high-level language process susceptible to impairment given mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI); however, minimal research exists about assessing or treating this aspect of language performance. This study's purpose was to determine the effect of a multicomponent intervention on the written expression of an undergraduate…

Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

Reviews discourse analytic and text comprehension studies for their contributions to a cognitive process view of writing, then reports on a study that combines discourse analysis with online pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. (FL)

Noting that expert computer systems respond to various contexts in terms of knowledge representation, this paper explains that heuristic rules of production, procedural representation, and frame representation have been adapted to such areas as medical diagnosis, signal interpretation, design and planning of electrical circuits and computer system…

Describes three semantic theories for teaching the writing process (case grammars, the "given-new" contract, and cohesion), with their implications for helping students communicate more effectively with their audiences. (RL)

Explores the concept of ambiity in semantic relationships, and discusses several causes of relational ambiguity, including differing world views, subtext construction, and selective focusing. Asserts that while most instances of relational ambiguity do not impair text comprehension, readers should be aware of possible ambiguities. (MM)

Text linguistics can make significant theoretical and practical contributions for writing teachers. Borrowing from classical rhetoric and cognitive psychology, text linguists investigate defining text, creating text grammars, and identifying communicative aspects of text. To show how these investigations are useful for writing teachers, this…