Following an introduction by James Britton, this book discusses the attitudes and values giving rise to effective writing instruction. The seven chapters examine the following topics: (1) achieving a philosophical perspective on composing through awareness of how writers actually work; (2) assumptions underlying classical rhetoric; (3) writing as…

The issue addressed in this paper is the relationship between form in fictional prose and form in other uses of language, particularly those uses important in composition theory. Form in composition theory has traditionally had two ways of identifying units of analysis: (1) the sentence and semantic units, and (2) pragmatic and rhetorical units.…

The five major articles in this journal issue focus on television criticism as an academic field. An introduction, entitled "The 'Scholar's Anthology': Televisual Studies" (Bruce Gronbeck), is followed by articles discussing the following topics: (1) the discourses of television quiz programs (John Fiske), (2) the dialectic of feminine…

A study compared and contrasted the use of openings, summational closings, and closures in Italian and U.S. business letters to examine the role of culture in international business communication. It is argued that the Italian business letter should be studied in a functional intra-cultural perspective where its meaning creates and maintains…

Revision poses a curious problem for the theorist because it is as difficult to define as it is to direct. Not only does it imply and require re-vision, or re-seeing, but also the prior existence of a vision, a "seeing," encoded in text. The theoretical problem of revision is further exacerbated by the issues of discourse convention and…

In an effort to deal with a single aspect of a multifaceted interaction between technical and social discourse, this essay examines the movement of scientific discourse between the realms of politics and science. The paper addresses the effects on scientific methodology wrought by the Nazi employment of science as a basis for racial politics. The…

When students write syntheses in response to a rhetorical task, does the rhetorical nature of the task exert some special influence on the students' composing processes? How do these processes differ? Three case studies, quantitative analyses of papers written by seventeen undergraduates, and a tentative model of a synthesizing process address…

The effects of the randomization of information in clinical cases on the comprehension of 16 physicians and 16 medical students were studied, using structured and unstructured forms of two clinical cases. Attention was directed to the effects of case difficulty and text structure on representations of cases in written protocols, ability to access…

In an effort to examine the hierarchical relations in the development of discourse topics, the narrative-descriptive essays of 55 university freshmen were analyzed in terms of L. Lautamatti's five sentence types. In type 1, the initial element is in the position of the grammatical subject, and is the topical subject. In type 2, the topical and…

The proceedings of the Georgetown Round Table on language and public life are divided into four sections dealing with: (1) language in public life and international affairs, (2) language spread and language policy, (3) language and the professions, and (4) the language of public persuasion. The articles in these sections treat the following…

Twelve seventh grade and 23 eleventh grade students participated in a study that investigated age differences in the use of discourse planning. Subjects were given a list of games and asked to indicate which they knew well enough to explain to a peer. Subjects acting as speakers were seated at a table with a tape recorder present. Half had a…

To examine political debate formats with regard to past usage and future possibilities, an analysis was made of the format features of the 1960, 1976, and 1980 general election presidential debates. Also analyzed were the formats used in the primary debates for Democratic presidential candidates in 1976 and for the Republican presidential…

These five papers reflect a single project--discourse analysis in the curriculum. The first paper, "The Small Group Course as a Setting for Naturalistic Research" (Charles Petrie and Charles Laufersweiler), describes the teaching process of integrating both a graduate and an undergraduate class from which the other four papers describe resulting…

Working on the assumption that members of organizations create their own organizational reality by interpreting the behaviors and activities they see, the stories and myths about the organization that they hear, and pressures to conform to the norms and practices of the organization that they feel, a study examined a total of 58 stories collected…

A study investigated the relationship between cognitive style and coherence in discourse. The primary hypothesis was that coherence would vary bimodally by cognitive style classification. Forty-four freshman composition students from three west coast colleges completed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Group Embedded Figures Test, and the…