There is no doubt that manuals of style such as the famous American
high-school text by Strunk and White ( 1979) discuss important issues of
textual organisation. What such manuals often lack is any systematic
framework within which to discuss such organisation, and often matters of
information structure or cohesion are described vaguely as questions of
emphasis, balance, rhythm, monotony or variety, or simply as good or bad
style. Similarly, work by British educationalists (e.g. Britton et al., 1975) has
usefully discussed the different functions of written language, such as poetic,
expressive and transactional. They have also usefully pointed to the unfair
demands often placed on school pupils who are expected to produce final
draft writing before producing and revising preliminary drafts, arguing for
the value of both exploratory talk and exploratory writing. Again, however,
such work is often inexplicit in its discussion of form-function relations.