Functional Redundancy and Ellipsis as Strategies in Reading and Writing  

Redundancy is widely seen as a kind of linguistic cholesterol, clogging the arteries of our prose and impeding the efficient circulation of knowledge. However, I will argue that, just as a more thorough understanding of cholesterol reveals the existence of good cholesterol (HDL) as well as bad (LDL), so a broader view on the principle of redundancy reveals its effectiveness in certain situations, particularly beyond the sentence level. In this article I aim to revive the beneficial or functional sense of redundancy and show that functional redundancy in writing need not be a contradiction in terms. I believe a discussion of redundancy should include its opposite, ellipsis, so I will define both terms, emphasizing the beneficial sense of each, and then show how they appear in both reading and writing. In the latter part of the article, to illustrate the pervasiveness of redundancy and ellipsis, I will discuss examples of each in document design and in figures of speech. My attention will mainly be on technical writing, but the principles I will discuss may apply to other genres, too.

Grant-Davie, Keith. JAC (1995). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Online Education Horror Stories Worthy of Halloween: A Short List of Problems and Solutions in Online Instruction    

This article examines many surprising problems that arise in the process of distance education using the Internet and describes ways in which instructors and administrators can solve these problems. The information in the article is based largely on the experience of educators at Utah State University who have been exploring distance education for the past six years by teaching a wide range of online courses via the Internet. As a result of this varied online teaching, we have encountered a broad spectrum of challenges to which we have tried to respond and from which we have tried to learn. The solutions described are generalizable to other programs using online delivery for instruction.

Hailey, David E., Keith Grant-Davie, Christine A. Hult. Computers and Composition (2001). Articles>Education>Online>Collaboration