ABSTRACT
Perhaps a more accurate title for this chapter would be “Informal Reasoning about Informal Reasoning about Informal Reasoning.” I am not concerned here with the ways that rhetorical theory relates to informal reasoning or to the increasingly complex kit of heuristics that teachers of composition have been assembling to help students think about what they are writing. I want, instead, to examine—informally—some of the considerations that are apparently used by those who informally judge the quality of a writer's informal reasoning on the basis of the way that writer evidences reasoning in continuous written discourse.
