Wholeness

[James Cornish]

>What exactly do you mean by "an impression of wholeness"?

>Tom H

Not to step on Bill Mann's turf here, but this particular issue
confronts me quite a bit.

To my way of viewing things, a text is overtly defined by offering to
the reader or listener a beginning, middle and an end.  The most readily
available form of this, off the top of my head, are narratives.  Labov's
abstract-action-evaluation-resolution-coda type of setup.  In the case
of academic essays in the United States, a reader expects certain parts
of a whole 'presentational / subject matter'-like thing sometimes
defined as a 'text' within a genre.  Of course this wholeness is subject
to the constraints any semantic/grammatical/cognitive unit has on it,
which in turn dialectically adds to the coherence/ non-coherence of the
text if one views such things from a feature-based perspective.

--
James W. Cornish
Co-coordinator - Writing Center
English Dept/ Discourse Studies
Texas A&M University
College Station
TX  77840
409-845-3452 ex.40