Two points--that arrangement is as important as invention in the study of rhetoric and that coherence, vital to arrangement, can be more fully understood through discourse analysis--are argued in this paper. Following a brief review of the literature that stresses the importance of arrangement and the contributions of linguistic research to…

Shows how teachers can use concepts from discourse analysis to help students who have difficulty in understanding the relationships between and within sentences. (EL)

Introduces and demonstrates the various ways that writers keep track of the main theme of the exposition and how they change signals to and from subtopics to maintain continuity in texts. Concludes with notes on teaching this material. (PD)

This comparative study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshman before and after instruction to determine if a process-centered mode of teaching had a more significant impact than a traditional form-centered mode of instruction on discourse coherence in composition. The study used a pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental design with both…