Teachable aspects of writing

Some eminently teachable aspects of writing:

    • overall structure

    • topic sentences and paragraph hooks

    • length - web-based lexical tools, sentence length, av word length

    • discourse markers

    • conjuncts

    • voice

    • hedging/use of modals

    • first person

    • sexist language

    • relationship with audience - expert/shared knowledge

    • use of e.g., etc. i.e.

    • coherence and cohesion

The linguistic resources for these concepts is what makes them.

Chris Tribble writes in his online article, Genres, Keywords, Teaching: towards a pedagogic account of the language of Project Proposals of an approach to selecting key words from texts and domains for further study so as to improve the novice writer's grasp of standard aspects of the genre in which they are writing.

Being written in 2000, he goes to some length to explain key words, which is a clear explication for the newbie.