Presents a variety of approaches to text description that have been proposed in the linguistic literature in the last decade or so. The book is organized to make it easy to understand and compare the various approaches. Researchers analyze a letter by a Washington-based lobby group.

1. Introduction; 2. I. Text Organization; 3. Text as Purposive Communication: A Meaning-based Analysis (by Callow, Kathleen); 4. Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis (by Mann, William C.); 5. An Analysis of a Plea for Money (by Meyer, Bonnie J.F.); 6. The Discourse Strategy of an Appeals Letter (by Longacre, Robert E.); 7. The Notion of Unspecific versus Specific as one Way of Analysing the Information of a Fund-Raising Letter (by Winter, Eugene); 8. An Integrated Three-Pronged Analysis of a Fund-Raising Letter (by Jordan, Michael P.); 9. How I Understand a Text - via the Structure of the Happenings and the Telling of Them (by Pike, Evelyn G.); 10. II. Lexico-Grammatical Approaches to the Text; 11. The Flow of Ideas in a Sample of Written Language (by Chafe, Wallace); 12. The ZPG Letter: Subjects, Definiteness, and Information-status (by Prince, Ellen F.); 13. Some Lexicogrammatical Features of the Zero Population Growth Text (by Halliday, M.A.K.); 14. Macro-Proposals: Meaning by Degree (by Martin, J.R.); 15. Collocation and Field of Discourse (by Benson, James D.)