Two questionnaire experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 styles (hyperbole and orthographically deviant writing style) on the perception of hiniku, 'quasi-irony', and oseji, 'quasi-flattery', in the Japanese language. In each experiment, stories were constructed in which a speaker made a remark evaluating the addressee's…

The last decade has witnessed increasing interest in email communication. Research in this area has focused on stylistic conventions, the role of email in the communication patterns of a company and the link between emails and corporate culture. Most of the studies so far published have concentrated on simple, one-way emails. However, evidence…

This article proposes that resonances exist between the curriculum vision advanced by the Panel for Education for Sustainable Development (1998) and key Bakhtinian motifs, such as dialogism, polyphony, and heteroglossia. The Panel's support for postmodern perspectives, however, makes the conjunction with Bakhtin problematic, due to anxieties that…

Various conceptions of metaphor worked out within a generative framework are presented. The term metaphor is used to denote any instance of figurative language use. It is concluded that the restrictions imposed by Chomsky's theory are too idiosyncratic for any adequate study of metaphor to be developed within its framework. (Available from: See FL…

Kellogg Community College revised its catalog to make it more student-oriented by explaining open enrollment, credit hours, contact hours, individualized instruction, modular units, etc., in concise lay terms. 80,000 new catalogs were published as Sunday supplements to 6 area newspapers in June 1974. (DC)

The pragmatic use of nicknames as clarifiers separates the Maltese usage from those so common throughout the world where the nickname is used as a means of hiding identity. The familial character of most nicknames in Malta suggests they are the vestiges of a pre-Christian naming system. The major peculiarity in Malta is in the intermingling of…

Many authors of adolescent novels follow a formula when developing a pattern of action. The formula, however, is not predictable and may be one of action, humor, or ideas. (JH)

This paper advises poetry readers to get rid of the inhibitions that the search for conventional meaning creates, by invoking the tenet that "a poem must not mean but be." The paper presents and analyzes several poems, maintaining that good poetry is an honest presentation of real experience that rarely offers information about any short-term…

Almost every discussion of technical or scientific writing style mentions the passive voice as a stylistic choice to avoid. However, the passive voice does have legitimate uses in technical and scientific writing--the problem is to define the appropriate or effective uses and the inappropriate or ineffective ones. An examination of passive voice…

While editors have no way of encoding most of the features of the human voice, they are often able to use punctuation and other devices to give the impression of speech. While retaining many distinctive features of a personal voice is possible in writing, considerations of voice are inseparable from considerations of textual features and audience…

Antecedents of linguistic nonimmediacy were examined in a four-factor analysis of covariance with repeated measures design. Immediacy refers to the language of a message expressing a close relationship to the referent, while nonimmediacy suggests that the language expresses a more distant relationship. Subjects in the study were 118 college…

Student writers should be encouraged to move beyond a "jargon" or "public discourse" model of writing. This can be accomplished by capitalizing on the students' knack for imitation by turning it into public parody. After being divided into small panels of three, four, or five members, students are assigned a voice and topic and asked to develop a…

THIS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY COVERS THE FIELD OF READABILITY AND READING. THE SELECTED WORKS ARE ORGANIZED INTO NINE SECTIONS--(1) GENERAL REFERENCES ON READABILITY, (2) MEASURING OF READABILITY, (3) READABILITY AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE, (4) READABILITY AND VOCABULARY, (5) READABILITY AND LITERARY STYLE, (6) READABILITY IN SUBJECT AREA MATERIALS, (7)…