Hello JS Thanks for responding to my curiousity. Good to know that we captured some of the literary patterning (purely, by accident, by the way) in coding some of Erickson's work. Your Stein example is interesting - I would code it as a fine example of what I insist that trainers be competent to do - namely, when faced with a task of presenting a pattern (either as part of a scheduled presentation or more impressively, in response to an unanticipated question), the trainer should strive to demonstrate the answer to the question rather than offer a left-brained intellectual response. Simple example, Participant: What is an embedded question? Trainer: I am wondering whether you have actually heard examples of embedded questions but failed to recongized them. Some patterns lead themselves easily to this form of inducing an appreciation of a pattern, others are more of a challenge. This seems to capture the spirit of Stein's example. Your Pollock example is less obvious. Clearly (thinking about the various Pollock's I have seen) when there is neither a representational presentation nor some set of abstract or geometrical forms present in a painting, the only thing left is the paint itself, the hues and satuations... involved and their organization with respect to one another. So, from my limited point of view, I would propose that the physical paint itself in the content (or if you are willing to transcend some of the traditional categories, the response elicited by the painting in the viewer is the content) while the arrangement of the various hues, saturations, physical placements of the various paints is the form. But in any case, when a radical departure (such as Pollocks's) from traditions is involved, it is obvious that the classification of elements such as form and content are called into deep question. The Ashbery poem is also interesting - while I can find (even in the small section you quoted) a number of interesting patterns, I remain uncertain about how to interpret your original observation. I thank you very much for your patience in presenting several examples to stimulate my thinking about this issue. The Pollock example reminds me very much of the struggle Carmen and I went through working out the portion of Whispering in the section around pages 334 - 344. All the best, John Grinder