The editor of "English Quarterly" interviews Frank O'Hare about his work on sentence combining, his views about writing instruction and writing research, and about his own writing. (RL)

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

This paper deals with the computer's production and recognition of sentences in a connected discourse and its application to computer assisted instruction. Studies of textual properties in real discourses have been carried out at the paragraph level. The theoretical concepts of representing paragraph content in terms of (1) the factual data…

Differences in spoken and written English appear at every level of the language; there are differences in phonology, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax, as well as differences in acceptability levels. This study contains four sections and an inventory of contrasting forms. Section One deals with domains and modalities including those discourse…

The teaching of discourse features which affect the relations among sentences in a paragraph has often been delayed until students are considered advanced. Yet, because control of such features is considered essential to gaining control of language segments, instruction in these features should be given from the beginning. One category of…

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…

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 textbook attempts to augment the general handbook information needed in any composition class with specific information that the non-native speaker needs, for example, the distribution of determiners with the various noun subclasses, and the syntactical relationship of subordinator to subordinate clause; and to apply the techniques and…