ABSTRACT
Relationships between written texts and their contexts in these conversations can be analyzed in many ways.! The term "autonomous text" is from an influential article by David Olson. In "From utterance to text:' Olson (1977) argued that there has been an historical progression, and that there should be educational progression, toward the construction of texts in which meaning is explicitly and unambiguously expressed in words and syntactic patterns. He wrote:
Later in the same article, Olson described the effect of this historical development on the writer: "[The writer's task] now was an adequate explicit representation of the meaning, relying on no implicit premises or personal interpretations" (p. 268). As evidence for his argument, Olson drew on a moment in the history of written texts-17th-Century England-in the domain in which text explicitness should be the most complete: natural science. I will reexamine that history; look carefully at another moment from the same natural science domain: the first report, in 1953, by microbiologists James Watson and Francis Crick of their discovery of the structure of DNA; explore briefly the special problems faced by very distant readers; and then, on the basis of the two meanings of "myth," suggest implications for the teaching of writing.
