ABSTRACT
Writing will refuse to fit into a cut and dried scheme of labels, no matter how cunningly or patiently constructed. We are all aware, as readers, of this refusal and of attempts to coin new labels to bring the system back to neatness and harmony: free verse, concrete poetry, documentary novel, creative biography. In writing notes, thinking on paper, many diary entries, some personal letters, are expressive. Some apparently more public writing can assume expressive characteristics too, when the distance between writer and reader is deliberately reduced: gossip columns in newspapers, informally 'conversational' autobiographies are instances of this. With transactional writing, both informative and conative, we are back on familiar ground. Conative writing has two aspects. The first is persuasion, which figures so largely in the rhetorical system. The other is regulation, where writing is used directly to control behaviour. Poetic writing is its own justification: an object made out of language to please the writer.
