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SECTION ONE: SETTING THINGS UP

Chapter 1: Writing Difficult Texts

Rene 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 explanation
of 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 section
is, 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 get
this clear from the outset, there is a much better chance that what follows later
will 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 work
more 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 several
years: "How is it that some pieces of apparently well- formed writing work
better than others?" Coulthard refers to this problem when he talks about the
way in which any given text can be seen "as just one of an indefinite number
of possible texts, or rather possible textualizations, of the writer's message
." (Coulthard M 1994:1, emphasis in the original). And because I have
taught 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 on
insights developed over the last decade in empirical linguistics and corpus
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research (Biber 1988, Biber D, S Conrad & R Reppen 1994, Botley S, Glass
G, 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 text
that 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 it
has 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 PHARE
1
programme, and two to the UK
government'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 approaches
in the development of writing instruction programmes for learners wishing to
write into other complex genres. A more detailed account of PPs and the texts
in the PP Corpus will be given in Chapter 3: Approaching the data: dealing
with 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, the
thesis will also contain a number of small case studies (see Section Three:
Talking to writers) which reconnect the texts in the research corpus with the
organisations 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 for
undertaking 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 be
summarised 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)
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what I understand by writing, by difficult and by texts and will
take 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 for
later discussions of pedagogy to be situated in an understanding
of current writing instruction.
Output 3 an account of possible applications of empirical linguistics in
the development of writing instruction materials. This account
will form the major part of the thesis and will focus on the
needs of writers of one particular kind of text. It will contain
several chapters in which the methodology I have adopted will
be explained, and the findings I have obtained will be
discussed.
Output 4 an account of the ways in which expert writers view a) the texts
that have been the subject of the corpus analysis, and b) the
writing 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, difficulty
and 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 composing
from writing which does not; this distinction is useful because
most of what is referred to academically as writing assumes
composing. Composing involves the combining of structural
sentence units into a more-or- less unique, cohesive and
coherent larger structure (as opposed to lists, forms, etc.). A
piece of writing which implicates composing contains surface
features which connect the discourse and an underlying logic of
organisation 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 to
what 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 involved
writing without composing! It also has the merit of being a reasonable focus
for EFL pedagogy. There are limits to the kinds of project that writing
teachers can take on, and the kinds of responsibility they can assume
(especially in the foreign language). To help learners write in the sense
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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 has
made a more comprehensive statement of what writing is, and also indicated
the problems that teachers and researchers face in dealing with this fuller
understanding of the object of their professional activity:
" . any conceptualization of writing must be able to
accommodate not only the production and use of extensive
alphabetic texts but also the production and use of minor (e.g.,
lists, labels, notes) forms of "writing" and texts such as
engineering proposals, guidebooks to indigenous plants, and
scholarly articles, all of which typically employ more than one
symbol system. Second, [] any conceptualization must be
able 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 of
whether the writer traffics in linguistic or nonlinguistic
symbols. Third, [] any conceptualization must be able to
account for both the protracted and the collaborative nature of
composing regardless of the symbol system the "writer" might
employ 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 is
currently collapsed meets these three criteria, in large part
because those perspectives all presuppose verbal language as
the only sign system relevant to the study of writing." (Witte S
1992:249)
2.3 In this understanding of writing, when writing teachers set out to help learners
to 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 and
the 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 of
these broader cultural and interactional issues suggested by Witte. We will
also see that this can be fraught with difficulty, raising as it does questions
about which social context text is constructing. Is it an anglophone and
geographically discrete institution such as a British university, or a
multinational corporation (such as Volvo) whose corporate language may be
English 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?
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2.5 Witte himself indicates that the questions he raises have not been satisfactorily
researched, let alone answered. In this present writing I shall restrict myself to
the more rough-and-ready understanding of "writing" outlined by Grabe and
Kaplan. 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 more
effective support as they develop the language system knowledge and the
cognitive skills they need in order to compose texts that are appropriate to the
contexts in which they will find themselves writing.
What then of difficult?
3. Difficult
" thirty years ago, my older brother, who was ten years old at
the 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 at
our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table
close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and
unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the
task 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 of
writing) can feel some envy for the boy in the passage quoted above. I can
regret 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 too
often, it just isn't like that. I would not deny that part of the difficulty which
faces 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 a
lack of understanding of the problem being addressed, or a lack of familiarity
with 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 the
Australian 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 are
small 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 the
style of Text B (which he classes as DESCRIPTION), but less frequently in
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that of Text A (REPORT), and that they often find this latter presents them
with 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 own
experience. (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 of
genres 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 fundamental
differences 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 teaching
writing 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 D
M 1982, White R & V Arndt 1991, Zamel V 1983) may inhibit learners
from taking on a range of powerful social roles which depend on explicit
knowledge of language and a range of literacy practices which are not
necessarily acquired easily. In so far as it has been critical of process writing
and the cultural relativism associated with this moment, part of the genre
literacy 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 to
make things happen. It would seem that difficulties in writing might not
necessarily be solved by just taking things one step at a time, and working
through 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 they
are to have a reasonable chance of succeeding in achieving particular writing
objectives. These are:
content knowledge knowledge of the concepts involved in the
subject 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 to
the writing task in hand

2
see Chapter 2
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language knowledge knowledge of those aspects of the language
system 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 more
approachable, as it is evident that writers may face problems along any of
these dimensions. Halliday and Hasan's discussion of the relationship between
text and context underscores this:
"To think of text structure not in terms of the structure of each
individual text as a separate entity, but as a general statement
about a genre as a whole, is to imply that there exists a close
relation between text and context [.]. The value of this
approach lies ultimately in the recognition of the functional
nature of language. [.] there cannot be just one right way of
either speaking or writing. What is appropriate in one
environment may not be quite so appropriate in another.
Further, there is the implication that an ability to write an
excellent essay on the causes of the Second World War does
not establish that one can produce a passable report on a case in
a court of law. This is not because one piece of writing is
inherently more difficult or demanding than the other, but
because one may have more experience of that particular
genre." (Halliday MAK & R Hasan 1985:6)
3.7 When one faces difficulty in writing in a particular genre, then, this difficulty
can 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 to
develop an appropriate wording of the required text by the genre
a lack of knowledge of the text structures normally required in order to
instantiate meaning in this particular communicative context
3.8 Myers draws attention to these kinds of problem when he discusses the
contrasting narratives which are required by texts developed for an audience
of peers as opposed to a general, popular, readership:
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"Textual differences in narrative structure, in syntax, and in
vocabulary 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 conceptual
structure of the discipline. The popularizing articles, on the
other hand, present a sequential narrative of nature in which
the plant or animal, not the scientific activity, is the subject, the
narrative is chronological, and the syntax and vocabulary
emphasize 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 journal
and 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 be
aware 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 system
that 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 repertoire
of ways of writing or they may find themselves restricted to the roles in
which 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 in
Evolution, a specialized scientific journal, was 'The
reproductive 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 gave
Parker'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 and
lexical selections in order to arrive at this contextually felicitous re-wording
(i.e. "The reproductive behaviour and the nature of sexual selection "
"sex"; " within the reproductive area" "around the cow-pats"). Similar
issues 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 as
she or he prepares, composes and revises. Process writing research (see
Chapter 2) has demonstrated that writing is not just a step by step activity and
a specific experience exemplifies this. At the time of writing these words in
this 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 hours
is 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 most
of the time having cups of tea in the kitchen it does start to give an
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indication of how long this particular piece of text has taken to develop. And
the 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 planned
to 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 write
and 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 in
this 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 this
dissertation. 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
technology
3
, with my own understanding of the literature and my capacity to
organise 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 to
set 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 the
texts. I propose to focus on a narrow set of problems which can face writers
who 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 of
knowledge of what readers expect from such texts. I shall, therefore, be
focusing on the co-textual aspect of context knowledge and will attempt to
find 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 logistically
and 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 face
a 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 of
context knowledge" because this is a kind of difficulty that a teacher can help
with. As a writing teacher, I cannot take responsibility for the experience and

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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 .
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the content knowledge that the learner needs in order to fulfil real-world
writing 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 for
making meaning that are mediated through 'texts'". (Witte S
1992:237)
4.1 So far we have concluded that the main task of this thesis will be to consider
the 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 epigraph
to 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 today
might 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 Goodman
1996:1)
4.2 "Texts" can include films, cartoons, wine- labels and advertisements, and if we
consider 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 which
clutter those of the less fortunate amongst us. Texts (like apples) can be many
things, 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 is
a 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 important
for the rest of my argument:
Bakhtin a text was "any coherent complex of signs." (Bakhtin MM
1986:103)
Halliday the essential feature of text:
"is that it is interaction. The exchange of meanings is an
interactive process, and text is the means of exchange: in order
for the meanings which constitute the social system to be
exchanged between members they must first be represented in
some exchangeable symbolic form, and the most accessible of
the available forms is language. So the meanings are encoded
in (and through) the semantic system, and given the form of
text." (Halliday MAK 1978:139-140)
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De Beaugrande and Dressler a text is a:
"COMMUNICATIVE OCCURRENCE which meets seven
standards of TEXTUALITY. If any of these standards is not
considered 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 Situationality
Intertexuality
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. They
comment 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. Fairclough
shows 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 situated." (Clark and Ivanic 1997:11)
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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 when
the 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 "a
text 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 shall
select and discuss the texts which will be considered in this thesis. My
difficult texts will be examples of written language in use. They will be
identifiable discourse segments, and, they will be drawn from real- life
instances 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 outputs
which will be required in order to achieve the overall aim of this thesis to
help myself and others work more effectively as teachers of writing. Having, I
hope, fulfilled my obligation to account for the writing, difficult, and texts of
my 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
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provide me with a basis for the recommendations for writing instruction that I
shall 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 in
the 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 will
accept that I have chosen these texts because they are interesting examples of
a 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 the
difficulties that are faced when applying one of the major corpus based models
of 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 are
matched 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 an
indication 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 writing
who are interested in drawing on the sorts of tools and techniques which
empirical linguistics offers to the practical language teacher.