ANOTHER LOOK AT PARAGRAPHS IN TECHNICAL WRITING.

John L. Selzer

Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationArticle

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Because of doubts about the status of paragraphs after World War II and the influence of readability formulas which emphasize sentence length and word length, technical writing teachers and texts have not been concerned very much with stylistic matters, especially at the paragraph level. However, recent research advances in the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and readability all redirect our attention to matters beyond the sentence in technical writing. A familiarity with such advances - including an understanding of cohesion elements, the ″given-new contract,″ and tagmemics (study of the smallest unit of grammatical form) - can enable technical writing instructors to improve student writing.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages293-301
Number of pages9
Volume10
No4
Specialist publicationJournal of Technical Writing and Communication
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 1980

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Communication
  • Education

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