writing difficult texts

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SECTION ONE: SETTING THINGS UP

Chapter 1: Writing Difficult Texts

Renée Magritte© C. Herscovici, Brussels – Belgium

1. What I am attempting to do in this thesis

1.1 I chose the title for this thesis at the beginning of the research project, thinking

that it would be provocative and interesting − and it has been useful in helping

me focus on why I am doing what I am doing, and in providing an explanationof the project. The title has also presented me with a problem, as it could

commit me to dealing with several very large research areas and their

associated literatures − a task which is beyond the scope of what I want to do

in this particular piece of writing. What I propose to do in this opening sectionis, therefore, to state as clearly as I can the limits of what I am doing, and to

situate what I am trying to do in an appropriate research context. If I can getthis clear from the outset, there is a much better chance that what follows laterwill be seen as appropriate – and will, I hope, make sense.

1.2 This thesis has a practical aim − to help myself and (I hope) others to workmore effectively as teachers of writing. I started the research project with a

general question which had taxed me as a writer and as a teacher for severalyears: "How is it that some pieces of apparently well-formed writing work

better than others?" Coulthard refers to this problem when he talks about theway in which any given text can be seen "as just one of an indefinite numberof possible texts, or rather possible textual izations , of the writer's message

…." (Coulthard M 1994:1, emphasis in the original). And because I havetaught English to speakers of other languages throughout my career, I have

also had in mind a more specific question: "How can I help learners write

better?" − especially when matching writing style to writing purpose (Tribble

1985).

1.3 The main way in which I have approached this problem has been to draw oninsights developed over the last decade in empirical linguistics and corpus



research (Biber 1988, Biber D, S Conrad & R Reppen 1994, Botley S, GlassG, McEnery T & A Wilson 1996, Granger S & C Tribble 1998, Hoey M

1997a, McEnery T & A Wilson 1996, Oostdijk N 1988, Stubbs M 1995,Stubbs M 1996, Tribble C 1997, Wilson A & T McEnery 1994) in order to see

how useful they might be when it comes to dealing with the problems which

arise when someone, especially a foreign language student, is writing a textthat he or she finds difficult (what I mean by difficult being something that I

will discuss below). It is only recently that we have reached a point where ithas been possible to apply the results of corpus research to language education

(Aston G 1996, Flowerdew J 1996, Johns T 1988, Johns T and P King, eds.1991, Murison-Bowie S 1996, Stevens V 1995, Tribble C 1991, Tribble C &G Jones 1997), and it is in this area that I would like this thesis to make its

contribution.

1.4 The corpus linguistic component of the thesis centres on the analysis of 14

Project Proposals written during the period 1994-1996. Twelve of these were

submitted to the European Union's PHARE1

programme, and two to the UKgovernment's Overseas Development Administration (as it was then called).

These texts have been chosen because writing such documents is considered to be a demanding task by professional writers with experience in the field, and a

daunting undertaking for the apprentice. This is not to say that the end product of this thesis will be a "How to" handbook for writing project proposals. The texts are simply useful examples of the kinds of factual writing

problem that many professionals have to be prepared to address − and which,as a teacher, I want to be able to help my students learn to write. As such,

they offer a basis for assessing the usefulness of corpus linguistic approachesin the development of writing instruction programmes for learners wishing to

write into other complex genres. A more detailed account of PPs and the textsin the PP Corpus will be given in Chapter 3: Approaching the data: dealingwith genre.

1.5 While I feel that corpus linguistics offers teachers and students a major − and

very exciting − set of insights and tools, I also recognise that it is unlikely that

a corpus approach will offer all the pedagogic answers. For this reason, thethesis will also contain a number of small case studies (see Section Three:

Talking to writers) which reconnect the texts in the research corpus with theorganisations and writers who composed the proposals. By considering the

texts both as linguistic products and as the result of socially situated practices,

I hope to provide a more adequate response to the main motivation forundertaking this research − the desire to help apprentice writers to write more

effectively.

1.6 As with any other project, having decided my aim, I need to be clear about the

outputs which will be necessary to its achievement. These outputs can besummarised as follows:

Output 1 a statement of the grounds on which subsequent arguments will be developed. This statement will be mainly concerned with

1 The European Union's main development programme for countries in Central and Eastern Europe

(now including countries in the former Soviet Union)



what I understand by writing , by difficult and by texts and willtake up the rest of this chapter.

Output 2 a summary of what I consider to be key issues (and restrictions)in current approaches to the teaching of writing. This will form

the second chapter in the thesis and will make it possible forlater discussions of pedagogy to be situated in an understandingof current writing instruction.

Output 3 an account of possible applications of empirical linguistics inthe development of writing instruction materials. This account

will form the major part of the thesis and will focus on theneeds of writers of one particular kind of text. It will containseveral chapters in which the methodology I have adopted will

be explained, and the findings I have obtained will bediscussed.

Output 4 an account of the ways in which expert writers view a) the textsthat have been the subject of the corpus analysis, and b) thewriting processes required for the production of these texts.

Output 5 a report of findings and recommendations for possible pedagogic applications.

The next sections in this chapter will, therefore, focus on writing, difficultyand texts.

2. Writing

2.1 Grabe and Kaplan's distinction between "writing with composing" and"writing without composing" (Grabe W & R Kaplan 1996:4) neatly

summarises the basic view of writing that is taken in this thesis:

"… one may distinguish writing which involves composingfrom writing which does not; this distinction is useful because

most of what is referred to academically as writing assumescomposing. Composing involves the combining of structural

sentence units into a more-or-less unique, cohesive andcoherent larger structure (as opposed to lists, forms, etc.). A

piece of writing which implicates composing contains surfacefeatures which connect the discourse and an underlying logic oforganisation which is more than simply the sum of the meaning

of the individual sentences." (Grabe W & R Kaplan 1996:4)

Such an understanding of writing has the merit of simplicity and relevance towhat proposal writers do; it would only be in a moment of extreme cynicism

that a proposal writer would say that his or her task was one which involvedwriting without composing! It also has the merit of being a reasonable focus

for EFL pedagogy. There are limits to the kinds of project that writingteachers can take on, and the kinds of responsibility they can assume

(especially in the foreign language). To help learners write in the sense



outlined above − especially if you only have contact once a week for one or

two semesters − is realistic. To claim to do much more is probably not.

2.2 Clearly Grabe and Kaplan's account of writing has its limitations. Witte hasmade a more comprehensive statement of what writing is, and also indicated

the problems that teachers and researchers face in dealing with this fullerunderstanding of the object of their professional activity:

" …. any conceptualization of writing must be able to

accommodate not only the production and use of extensivealphabetic texts but also the production and use of minor (e.g.,

lists, labels, notes) forms of "writing" and texts such asengineering proposals, guidebooks to indigenous plants, andscholarly articles, all of which typically employ more than one

symbol system. Second, […] any conceptualization must beable to account for both the meaning constructive and social-

constructive dimensions of writing regardless of whether

writing be viewed as a process or a product and regardless ofwhether the writer traffics in linguistic or nonlinguistic

symbols. Third, […] any conceptualization must be able toaccount for both the protracted and the collaborative nature of

composing regardless of the symbol system the "writer" mightemploy at a given time. In my view, none of the perspectives

by which meaning-making has been treated in writing research

and none of the perspectives into which writing research iscurrently collapsed meets these three criteria, in large part

because those perspectives all presuppose verbal language asthe only sign system relevant to the study of writing." (Witte S1992:249)

2.3 In this understanding of writing, when writing teachers set out to help learnersto write, they should not only aim to help their students to use the "minor

texts" and more extended forms familiar to EFL teachers (see Chapter 2:Teaching Writing below), they should also help learners engage with the"meaning constructive and social-constructive" dimensions of writing, and

with the complex interactions that arise around writing in the workplace andthe academy. This is a much broader task than helping learners to develop

skills in "writing as composing", but can still usefully be borne in mind by

teachers and materials writers who are working with apprentice writers.2.4 We will, in fact, see in Chapter 2 that in areas such as business communication

and English for academic purposes EFL materials writers do take on some ofthese broader cultural and interactional issues suggested by Witte. We will

also see that this can be fraught with difficulty, raising as it does questionsabout which social context text is constructing. Is it an anglophone andgeographically discrete institution such as a British university, or a

multinational corporation (such as Volvo) whose corporate language may beEnglish but whose headquarters are in Sweden and which employs staff or has

affiliates in most countries on the planet? Or is it an amorphous polyglot bureaucracy such as the PHARE office in Brussels? When an apprentice

writer is asked to build Babel, what assistance can the teacher offer?



2.5 Witte himself indicates that the questions he raises have not been satisfactorilyresearched, let alone answered. In this present writing I shall restrict myself to

the more rough-and-ready understanding of "writing" outlined by Grabe andKaplan. Thus, when I say "writing", I am referring to writing as composing,

and when I refer to helping students to write better, I am concerned primarily

with ensuring that learners of English as a foreign language are given moreeffective support as they develop the language system knowledge and the

cognitive skills they need in order to compose texts that are appropriate to thecontexts in which they will find themselves writing.

What then of difficult ?

3. Difficult

"… thirty years ago, my older brother, who was ten years old atthe time, was trying to get a report written that he'd had three

months to write, which was due the next day. We were out atour family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table

close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils andunopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of thetask ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm

around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy.Just take it bird by bird.'" (Lamott A 1994:19)

3.1 Part of me (my remembered self at such an age, my own self at this moment ofwriting) can feel some envy for the boy in the passage quoted above. I canregret that I have no wise mentor beside me now, ready to place a paternal arm

around my shoulder and provide me with such advice. 'Of course! Bird by bird! Why didn't I think of it before…?'. Part of me, however, is concerned at

the offer of this particular counsel to an apprentice writer, because, all toooften, it just isn't like that. I would not deny that part of the difficulty whichfaces us writers is the problem of working our way through the job in hand,

bird by bird, and that we do discover what we want to write by writing.However, it is not only extent which can daunt. Yes, there is the difficulty of

getting through the task, but there can also be problems which arise from alack of understanding of the problem being addressed, or a lack of familiaritywith texts like the one you are writing which creates the problems, and so

forth.

3.2 Martin touches on these other kinds of difficulty in a discussion of (some

pleasingly apposite) example of texts written by young children in theAustralian state education system:

Text A 'Birds live up in a tree. If they don't eat they die. Redbirds

blackbirds any colored birds. Dark birds light birds. Some aresmall and others are big.'

Text B 'My bird lived up in a tree. It ate so it wouldn't die. It was a black bird and it was small' (Martin J 1989:7)

3.3 Martin reports that he found young children were often asked to write in thestyle of Text B (which he classes as DESCRIPTION), but less frequently in



that of Text A (REPORT), and that they often find this latter presents themwith problems because they have not been taught how to go about the task.

He makes the distinction between these, and two other 'proto-genres' on the basis of differences of focus and generality:

particular general

event focus RECOUNT PROCEDURE

thing focus DESCRIPTION REPORT

(Martin J 1989:8)

In such a scheme, Text A is public, open to challenge and refutation, Text B is personal – a challenge to the text also implying a challenge to the writer's ownexperience. (Tribble C 1997:49). Martin's thesis in this instance was that if

we want children to have the capacity to write effectively across a range ofgenres – and to have the necessary command of appropriate lexico-

grammatical resources to complete such tasks, we need to give them

appropriate instruction. Martin concludes by commenting:

"… by focusing children's attention on the fundamentaldifferences between Descriptions and Reports, teachers could

help children to write more consistently in each genre."(Martin J 1989:7)

3.4 Underlying Martin's argument is a view that some approaches to teachingwriting – particularly those arising from progressivist educational theory(Bowers C A 1987, Ellsworth E 1989, Giroux H 1988), and which depend

heavily on what has been called a "process" approach to writing 2 (Murray DM 1982, White R & V Arndt 1991, Zamel V 1983) – may inhibit learners

from taking on a range of powerful social roles which depend on explicitknowledge of language and a range of literacy practices which are notnecessarily acquired easily. In so far as it has been critical of process writing

and the cultural relativism associated with this moment, part of the genreliteracy agenda has, therefore, been to give students access to a range of

factual genres (Cope B & M Kalantzis 1993, Martin J 1989) which take them beyond personal writing and into a world where written language is used tomake things happen. It would seem that difficulties in writing might not

necessarily be solved by just taking things one step at a time, and workingthrough the task from beginning to end – be it black birds or red birds.

3.5 I have proposed elsewhere that writers require four sets of knowledge if theyare to have a reasonable chance of succeeding in achieving particular writingobjectives. These are:

content knowledge knowledge of the concepts involved in thesubject area

writing process knowledge knowledge of the most appropriate way of preparing for a specific writing task

context knowledge knowledge of the social context in which

the text will be read, and co-texts related tothe writing task in hand

2 see Chapter 2



language knowledge knowledge of those aspects of the languagesystem necessary for the completion of the

task(Tribble C 1997: 43)

Table 1 - What writers need to know

3.6 Viewed from this perspective, the issue of difficulty becomes moreapproachable, as it is evident that writers may face problems along any of

these dimensions. Halliday and Hasan's discussion of the relationship betweentext and context underscores this:

"To think of text structure not in terms of the structure of eachindividual text as a separate entity, but as a general statementabout a genre as a whole, is to imply that there exists a close

relation between text and context [….]. The value of thisapproach lies ultimately in the recognition of the functional

nature of language. [….] there cannot be just one right way ofeither speaking or writing. What is appropriate in oneenvironment may not be quite so appropriate in another.

Further, there is the implication that an ability to write anexcellent essay on the causes of the Second World War does

not establish that one can produce a passable report on a case ina court of law. This is not because one piece of writing isinherently more difficult or demanding than the other, but

because one may have more experience of that particulargenre." (Halliday MAK & R Hasan 1985:6)

3.7 When one faces difficulty in writing in a particular genre, then, this difficultycan arise from a lack of many different kinds of knowledge, including:

• a lack of knowledge of compositional processes appropriate to writing in this

genre

• a lack of knowledge of the social relations in play in a genre

• a lack of knowledge of aspects of the language system required in order todevelop an appropriate wording of the required text by the genre

• a lack of knowledge of the text structures normally required in order toinstantiate meaning in this particular communicative context

3.8 Myers draws attention to these kinds of problem when he discusses thecontrasting narratives which are required by texts developed for an audience

of peers as opposed to a general, popular, readership:



"Textual differences in narrative structure, in syntax, and invocabulary help define two contrasting views of science. The

professional articles create what I call a narrative of science;they follow the argument of the scientist, arrange time into a

parallel series of simultaneous events all supporting their claim,

and emphasize in their syntax and vocabulary the conceptualstructure of the discipline. The popularizing articles, on the

other hand, present a sequential narrative of nature in whichthe plant or animal, not the scientific activity, is the subject, the

narrative is chronological, and the syntax and vocabularyemphasize the externality of nature to scientific practices.(Myers G 1990:142)

If a writer is asked to take a text originally developed for a scholarly journaland re-word it so that it will be appropriate for a news article, he or she should

be aware of the contrasting demands of the different narratives required by

these two kinds of media. Similarly, writers of project proposals have to beaware of the constraints of the genre, the kinds of narrative that are most likely

to be appropriate for their readership, and the aspects of the language systemthat they will need to draw on in order to achieve the textual effects they

require.

3.9 In order to achieve such textual effects authors have to have a broad repertoireof ways of writing – or they may find themselves restricted to the roles inwhich they are competent. Myers demonstrates this in his example of the shift

in the titling of an article as it was transferred from a specialised science journal to a popularising one:

"For instance, the title of an article by Geoffrey Parker inEvolution, a specialized scientific journal, was 'Thereproductive behaviour and the nature of sexual selection in

Scatophaga stercoraria L. (Diptera. Scatophagidae), IX.Spatial distribution of fertilization rates and evolution of male

search strategy within the reproductive area.' The editor gaveParker's New Scientist article the title 'Sex around the cow-

pats'. (Myers G 1994:180)

3.10 The writer of the popularising article has had to make a range of content andlexical selections in order to arrive at this contextually felicitous re-wording

(i.e. "The reproductive behaviour and the nature of sexual selection "è "sex"; " within the reproductive area" è "around the cow-pats"). Similarissues of knowledge and competence arise when we consider the way in which

a piece of writing is developed and the difficulties which can face a writer asshe or he prepares, composes and revises. Process writing research (see

Chapter 2) has demonstrated that writing is not just a step by step activity anda specific experience exemplifies this. At the time of writing these words inthis paragraph (07/03/98 13:07) Microsoft Word told me I had been editing the

chapter for 2,366 minutes – nearly 40 hours. Although the figure of 40 hoursis misleading as it refers only to the amount of time during which the

document has been 'open' on my computer – I might have been spending mostof the time having cups of tea in the kitchen – it does start to give an



indication of how long this particular piece of text has taken to develop. Andthe fact of the matter is that although I began to compose this first chapter in

February 1998 – that is when I first opened and named this file – and I plannedto finish it before the end of the month, the whole the process started during a

conversation with Henry Widdowson and Mike Stubbs over ten years earlier

in the autumn of 1987! So this "first" chapter has taken over ten years to writeand it has a relationship with the tens of thousands of words I've written

during that time which relate to these topics; other chapters which follow inthis thesis, but which were written before this chapter; and the two books and

several articles and papers which developed themes I am re-visiting in thisdissertation. Apart from the difficulty of working out what a PhD thesis might

be about, other difficulties I have faced here have been to do with time, with

technology3, with my own understanding of the literature and my capacity toorganise and marshal ideas and arguments.

3.11 Some of my ways out of difficulty have been found in what Britton has called

"shaping at the point of utterance" (Britton J 1983); other escape routes have been down to my experience of planning and developing other long texts.

However, given that writing can be difficult in so many ways, I again want toset a limit to what I have to say in this thesis. The kind of difficulty which I

shall be considering will relate primarily to an aspect of knowledge of thetexts. I propose to focus on a narrow set of problems which can face writerswho are working in what is for them a new genre - namely those that arise

from a lack of knowledge of texts like the one in hand, and a lack ofknowledge of what readers expect from such texts. I shall, therefore, be

focusing on the co-textual aspect of context knowledge and will attempt tofind ways of helping the writer who does not know what the genre requires of

them in terms of text organisation and wording.3.12 Such an approach does not, however, imply that difficulty is uniquely

determined by the demands of the reader. There are many reasons why a

particular text might be difficult to write.

• Does your job depend on your text closing the deal? – e.g. when an

advertising company bids for a new account

• Do you have enough time to complete the task? − e.g. writing under

examination conditions

•Is the task of a particularly demanding level of complexity (both logisticallyand intellectually)? − e.g. writing a PhD thesis

• Are you having to make the shift from primarily oral communication to

communication that is primarily written? − e.g. the dilemma which might facea skilled interviewer having to devise a written questionnaire for the first time

I have chosen to narrow my definition of difficulty to the "co-textual aspect ofcontext knowledge" because this is a kind of difficulty that a teacher can helpwith. As a writing teacher, I cannot take responsibility for the experience and

3 Shifting from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, the delights of Word master documents, coordinating files

between lap-tops and desktops, fitting graphics into the text ….



the content knowledge that the learner needs in order to fulfil real-worldwriting tasks. What I can do, however, is to offer pedagogic pathways into

unfamiliar texts so that that which was difficult because it was unfamiliar becomes less strange, and thereby, easier.

4. Texts

"To study writing is, over and above all else, to study acts formaking meaning that are mediated through 'texts'". (Witte S1992:237)

4.1 So far we have concluded that the main task of this thesis will be to considerthe needs of learners involved in the activity of combining "structural sentence

units into a more-or-less unique, cohesive and coherent larger structure"(writing ), in settings which involve what is for them a new genre (difficult ).The last element of the title of this thesis ought to be unproblematic (we all

know what a text is, don't we?), but – as with Magritte's apple in the epigraphto this chapter – it is probably better not to jump to conclusions on the basis of

appearances. A representation of an apple is not an apple. What is a text todaymight not have existed the day before. For Graddol and Goodman:

" new forms of text [….] have appeared in English as a

consequence of technological innovation and social change[….] new kinds of text reflect and help construct changing

identities and social relations." Graddol D & S Goodman1996:1)

4.2 "Texts" can include films, cartoons, wine- labels and advertisements, and if weconsider our own experience of the world we can add the cereal packets, junk-mail, jotted notes and shopping lists which clutter the kitchen tables of most

households, along with the e- mail printouts and doctoral dissertations whichclutter those of the less fortunate amongst us. Texts (like apples) can be manythings, some of them more slippery than others.

4.3 Such a view of text accepts that texts do not have to be written. Given below isa series of examples of different definitions of text. Although a rather long

list, they are offered here as they all share a feature which will be importantfor the rest of my argument:

• Bakhtin − a text was "any coherent complex of signs." (Bakhtin MM1986:103)

• Halliday − the essential feature of text:

"is that it is interaction. The exchange of meanings is aninteractive process, and text is the means of exchange: in order

for the meanings which constitute the social system to beexchanged between members they must first be represented in

some exchangeable symbolic form, and the most accessible ofthe available forms is language. So the meanings are encoded

in (and through) the semantic system, and given the form oftext." (Halliday MAK 1978:139-140)



• De Beaugrande and Dressler − a text is a:

"COMMUNICATIVE OCCURRENCE which meets sevenstandards of TEXTUALITY. If any of these standards is notconsidered to have been satisfied, the text will not be

communicative." (de Beaugrande R & W Dressler 1981:3)

De Beaugrande and Dressler's seven standards (1981:3-11) were:

Cohesion Intentionality Informativity

Coherence Acceptability SituationalityIntertexuality

• Brandt:

"… the text appears as an instrument of social interaction,conveying multiple messages about the social world in which it

has been developed" (Brandt D 1986:93)

• Stubbs refers to texts as:

"an instance of language in use, either spoken or written …"(Stubbs M 1996:4).

• Clark and Ivanic follow Fairclough in taking text as either spoken or written, but insist on seeing it as arising from specific social conditions. Theycomment on Figure 1 below as follows:

"One advantage of this diagram [after Fairclough 1989] is that

it illustrates graphically how the words themselves – 'text' – are

embedded in the social forces that produce them. Faircloughshows how a text (written or spoken) is inextricable from the

process of production and interpretation that create it, and that

these processes are in turn inextricable from the local,institutional and socio-historical conditions within which the

participants are situa ted." (Clark and Ivanic 1997:11)



Layer 3

Layer 2

Layer 1

Process of production

Process of interpretation

Interaction

Social conditions of interpretation

Social conditions of production

Context

Text

Figure 1 Clark and Ivanic 1997:11

• Grabe and Kaplan provide a useful summary of many of these positions when

they offer the following definition of a text as:

"… a structural equivalent of language in real use which

conveys meaning in all four senses of Hymes's (1972)communicative competence (whether a text is possible,feasible, appropriate, and performed), and which suggests a

topic of discourse (however minimal) [….] A text occurs whenthe discourse segment is identified as possible, feasible,

appropriate, and performed, and has a topic" (Grabe W & R

Kaplan 1996:40)

4.4 These various interpretations of text all emphasise its interactive and

communicative dimensions − with Grabe and Kaplan usefully stressing that "atext occurs when the discourse segment is identified as possible, feasible,

appropriate, and performed, and has a topic". It is this on this basis that I shallselect and discuss the texts which will be considered in this thesis. My

difficult texts will be examples of written language in use. They will beidentifiable discourse segments, and, they will be drawn from real- lifeinstances which are feasible, appropriate, performed and have a topic.

5. Signpost

5.1 Everything that I have said so far in this chapter about writing difficult texts

has been relatively abstract. In paragraph 1.6, I presented 5 major outputswhich will be required in order to achieve the overall aim of this thesis – tohelp myself and others work more effectively as teachers of writing. Having, I

hope, fulfilled my obligation to account for the writing , difficult , and texts ofmy title, I now feel that I should provide the reader with a more explicit map

of what follows.

5.2 In Chapter 2, I shall provide an overview of writing theory and review some of

the practical problems which arise in the teaching of writing. This review will



provide me with a basis for the recommendations for writing instruction that Ishall make in the closing chapter of this thesis.

5.3 In Chapter 3, I shall give a more detailed account of the data I shall be using inthe corpus study section of the thesis, and also comment on why I feel it

constitutes a discrete text genre. For the moment, I hope that the reader willaccept that I have chosen these texts because they are interesting examples ofa relatively unusual genre, and present significant difficulties for those

unfamiliar with the demands such a genre makes of the writer.

5.4 In Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, I shall present the findings from my analysis of the

PP corpus. This will first require (Chapter 4) a detailed account of thedifficulties that are faced when applying one of the major corpus based modelsof written and spoken language variation to a different data set from that used

in the original study (Biber D 1988). The following chapters will address the

different aspects of the PP corpus that I consider significant for this study −

that is, Grammar and Style, Lexis, and Organisation.

5.5 Following this linguistics section, I shall report on the findings of a survey in

which the results obtained from the empirical study of the research corpus arematched against the understanding of what Project Proposals are that are held

by writers in proposal writing organisations. This survey has been undertaken

in order to gain insights into how writers went about composing the proposals,and why they chose to write in the particular ways exemplified in the corpus.

5.6 The final chapters in the thesis will offer some recommendations for the possible pedagogic application of the approach adopted in this thesis, and anindication of future research directions. The pedagogy chapter has been

included as I feel it important to flag some of the advantages and limitations of

what I have done in this study, and to offer an agenda for teachers of writingwho are interested in drawing on the sorts of tools and techniques whichempirical linguistics offers to the practical language teacher.

writing difficult texts

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