ABSTRACT
Learning to write involves the learning of new syntax, and of the new syntactic unit, the sentence. It also involves learning of the larger structures within which sentences occur. Study in text linguistics and in stylistics over the last two decades has made it clear that there are linguistic structures beyond the sentence. Their grammar differs from sentence grammar as they express demands and needs of a kind different from those expressed in the single sentence. If sentences express ideas, perceptions, classifications, it is texts which provide the linguistic units within which these ideas, perceptions, classifications are organized into larger wholes. These units express the order which the writer wishes to establish at the largest level. The textual organization embodies the type of order which the writer perceives, or which he wishes to impose on that part of reality which he is presenting to the reader in the text. Textual structures have a world-ordering, even a world-creating function which is at least as significant as the world-encoding function of the sentence. To illustrate the point here is a brief extract from Hemingway’s First FortyNine Stories.
