For the past twenty years or so, the author has been fortunate to write for a fairly broad audience. While he was teaching, or running an educational program, or doing research, he was also composing opinion pieces or commentaries about the work he was doing. This process of writing with part of his attention on the classroom or research site and…

Discusses a critical approach for dealing with passages of superior literary merit in otherwise mediocre works and with shifts in the nature of languages" employed within a given work. (RD)

Examines the linguistic, rhetorical, and philosophical implications of a theory of style. (DD)

Explores the difficulty in defining cliche and distinguishing it from other idiomatic and indelible expressions in the English language. (HTH)

Presents detailed information about school English, a functional variety that has influenced twentieth-century American vernaculars and the writings of most Americans. Sets school English in its nineteenth-century context and comments on factors that have favored its survival. Comments briefly on the Black English case in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (RL)

Analyzes the ways several women have written persuasive discourse and identifies a female rhetorical mode involving indirection, open-endedness, additive attention to small details, restraint, and noncombativeness. (DD)

Good writing is discussed in terms of absolute literary values--"what is good writing" rather than "what is considered good writing." Major emphasis is focused on judging the quality of a literary work by its artistic merit instead of its political, social, or philosophical relevance. Examples of good and bad writing styles are cited throughout…

The author supports the theory that one of the important relationships between literature and knowledge is the language of literature. (MM)

The three books under review show what flux the English language has undergone and continues to undergo, and how stable grammatical theory has been until recent times. (Author)

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)

Reports on a survey of how laypeople responded to errors in usage, their attitudes toward the acceptability of certain errors, and the values they placed on certain language styles. (RL)

Compares the language usage of a working-class couple and a small-town mayor. Uses a Marxian rhetorical perspective to connect language styles and class distinctions. Considers the educational implications of this connection. (RL)

Describes experiences in helping women students discover their own voices and grounding that voice in their own experience. (CRH)

Analyzes George Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," to develop an argument about compositional pedagogy and the nature of writing itself. Points out the dangers of promulgating only the "plain style" of language usage and the paradoxical advantages of combining classical rhetoric with radical politics. (RL)