ABSTRACT
Written texts are known to have culturally preferred shapes that structure their overall organization and influence their internal patterning. These shaping forces, at both general and local levels, are neither incidental nor accidental; rather, they exist to provide orientations for both readers and writers. This chapter therefore presents an evaluative overview of research into these organizational properties of written texts. We start with broad-level analyses of discourse structure, along with social orientations to generic form. We then proceed to discuss more local organizational features such as coherence and cohesion and phraseological patternings and finally close with some reflections on likely future directions for research into written text.
