MEASURING EFFECTIVE WRITING - CLOZE PROCEDURE AND ANAPHORIC THIS

In this study of expert use of anaphoric ''this,'' six history textboo k passages written by composition instructors, text linguists, and pro fessional editors are submitted to doze procedure for comprehensive an alysis. Discrepancies in the predictability of content and function wo rds pinpoint examples of ineffective anaphoric expressions using ''thi s'' as a demonstrative pronoun (''unattended this'') or ''this'' as a demonstrative adjective introducing a noun phrase (''attended this''). The analysis indicates that (a) current stylistic guidelines prescrib ing unattended ''this'' are overstated and (b) attended ''this'' is be st employed when synonyms for the antecedent and descriptive adjective s are used to provide the reader new information about the referent. T he study's information theory perspective leads to the further general ization that effective written communication is often syntactically pr edictable and semantically not.