The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

All writers produce text content and ideally connect it together according to discourse conventions. We investigate whether a particularly strong disc ourse convention, the need for causal coherence in narratives, can predict the kind of text writers will produce. Causality has been found to be a sig nificant discourse factor in reading comprehension and hence can be expecte d to determine also what writers produce during composition. In Experiment 1, writers composed short continuations at various points throughout a simp le narrative, whereas in Experiment 2, writers composed continuations to co mplete several narratives. The results indicate that causality indeed plays a major role in composition. Writers tend to produce new text in such a wa y that it is causally connected to the prior text. Furthermore, writers fav ored causal relations of necessity or of necessity and sufficiency while la rgely avoiding relations of sufficiency alone, which suggests a general dis course constraint to be maximally informative (e.g., Grice, 1975).