Readable Writing: The Role of Cohesion and Redundancy.

Why did the turtle cross the road? To get to the shell station. Why did the hamburger go away from the bun? Because it wanted to be on the tray. The first riddle is funny in a way that the second is not, and the humor has to do with the play on meaning of turtle, shell and a brand of gasoline, a play which is missing in the second riddle. When my four-year-old daughter made up the second riddle, she was in a stage of children's language development where she had not yet learned a key characteristic of jokes: that one has to have an awareness of language as language and of variation and play in meaning (deVilliers and deVilliers 171-72). This metalinguistic awareness comes somewhat later in language development. For students learning to write, the ability to write readable prose requires a similarly broadened view and an ability to shift from the perspec tive of the writer to that of the reader. Some writing texts help students develop this ability to shift roles (Flower; Kiefer). Beginning writers are often unable to make this shift, and they may claim, for instance, that if they state the point they are trying to make at the beginning of an essay, the reader will have no motivation to read the rest. Despite this claim, when students read essays in which the point is stated clearly in the opening, they judge them to be good. Unlike children engaged in language acquisition, writing students can be taught to shift from a writer's perspective to a reader's. Doing so can help students understand important factors that make writing read able.