Rhetorical Structure Analysis and the Case of the Inaccurate, Incoherent Source-hopper

Educators believe that student coursework essays constitute an important learning tool in the development of conceptual understanding and linguistic expression The student essay, however, is rarely studied in any detail by texthnguists This article presents a case-study which compares a native-speaker undergraduate students performance in an examination and a course-work essay The essays were produced on the same topic within the space of six weeks Relational analysis, as conceived by Mann and Thompson (1986, 1988) in the construction of their rhetorical structure theory, was used to facilitate texthnguistic comparison of the two texts The theory is briefly introduced and relational analysis is justified as an appropriate framework The case study examplifies a contrast between an adequate handling of material in memory in examination conditions leading to a fairly readable text, and the uncertain handling of difficult source materials which results in an incoherent, almost unreadable coursework text Relational analysis facilitates the accurate diagnosis of the sources of this incoherence The findings are related to Bereiter and Scardamaha's (1987) knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming models of writing.