Nine selected papers presented at the Texas Writing Research Group's 1981 conference are offered in this collection. The papers discuss (1) sources of linguistic interference among American minorities; (2) contributions of discourse analysis to composition; (3) emerging notions of heuristic (investigative), eristic (controversial), and protreptic (persuasive) rhetoric in Homeric discourse: proto-literate conniving, wrangling, and reasoning; (4) the interactive process of evaluation in the writing conference; (5) sentence combining; (6) evaluation, revision, and instruction in writing; (7) the historical origins of writing; (8) the role that semantics plays in the production of written discourse; and (9) nuclear structures in discourse. (RL)