am not a Renaissance Man-in any sense of the words-I intend only to deal with what he has to say to those of us who teach and/or theorize about teaching the English language, especially writing. Several major ideas, all relating to the central idea of language as a tool, recur in Bruner's work. I will deal with four, beginning with language as a tool for thought, then going on to consider language as a vehicle for promoting cognitive growth, next to consider how some of his basic ideas and results of research

signed to teach composition, but few are trained to do it. Composition involves things like grammar, rhetoric, and logic, but often composition teachers have not formally studied those things. People applying for positions in composition programs sometimes submit transcripts listing English courses only in literature and literary criticism. If they are hired, they probably are very much at home, since often the people already teaching in those programs have similar backgrounds. Someone who has earned a degree in one of the programs created recently to train college English teachers, rather than to give traditional advanced degrees, is probably somewhat different. Those programs give some attention to composition teaching but often less than you might guess. Recently, there has been some resistance to the apparent excess of literature courses in the preparation of people who become composition teachers. Consequently, a real conflict between Lit and Comp has developed within the discipline of English. Because advocates of traditional literary training for all English teachers have long had command of the English profession, those in the relatively new resistance movement have had trouble

In Simple & Direct, Jacques Barzun, celebrated author and educator, distills from a lifetime of writing and teaching his thoughts about the craft of writing. In chapters on diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision, Barzun describes and prescribes the techniques to correct even the most ponderous style. Exercises, model passages -- both literary and unorthodox -- and hundreds of often amusing examples of usage gone wrong demonstrate the process of making intelligent choices and guide us toward developing strong and distinctive prose.

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ONE OF THE NICETIES of being in a philosophy department is the freedom one feels to poke his nose into the disciplines of others, usually under the guise of investigating the philosophical foundations of the Such undertakings, unfortunately, are not always viewed with great enthusiasm by those actually engaged in the discipline. In fact, they are sometimes viewed either dimly, awryly, or not at all. So it is nice if philosophy can provide, at least sometimes, some practical and useful solutions, or at least partial solutions, to the problems it is so famous for revealing. But logic? Could logic be a philosophical tool fit for such a practical task as the teaching of coherence in composition and reading? True, logic has sometimes been considered the discipline that chews up prose and spits out symbols. Still, it must be remembered that the processing that does occur in logic makes language more manageable; that is, it allows us (1) to isolate premises and conclusions of arguments, (2) to determine logical connections and relationships within such statements, and (3) to evaluate arguments for validity. As would be expected, logicians, in order to carry out this processing, have had to develop a number of linguistic and logical tools. Take, fOr example, what logicians call the propositional calculus. It is simply a fragment of natural language that uses what are called connectives-connectives which connect sentences in such a way that the truth or falsity of the whole can be based on that of the parts. For example, when the atomic sentences Horner loves Mrs. Pinchwife and Sparkish is a wit are put together with the connective or (or and, if, only if, if and only if, etc.) the truth or falsity of the resulting compound, or molecular, sentence is based on the truth or falsity of the component sentences. In this case, the molecular sentence Horner loves Mrs. Pinchwife or Sparkish is a wit is false just in case both Horner loves Mrs. Pinchwife and Sparkish is a wit are false. In contrast, the connective since is non-truth functional because the truth of falsity of a sentence like Since Sparkish is a wit, Horner loves Mrs. Pinchwife depends on more than just the truth or falsity of the component sentences. Presumably, it depends on some kind of connection between the states of affairs represented by the component sentences.

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DURING THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, the development of stylistics has opened new possibilities for classroom teaching. While most stylisticians ally themselves with the science of linguistics, the subject of their study is the art of prose; and so style study encounters a kind of schizophrenia between data-processing and aesthetic criticism. This split may be bothersome for the analyst, but it offers several distinct advantages for the teacher, foremost of which is the provision of a tool by which he can demonstrate the nature of prose art for students of the essay, who are usually, of course, students of writing as well. The methods of stylistics permit the teacher to focus clearly and specifically on the particular elements of the essay which create effects: on structures, diction, imagery, even tone and persona. And because the focus is quantitative, students can readily apprehend the causes of these effects, can isolate striking or typical elements, and can, if they want, imitate or avoid the characteristic style of the prose under scrutiny. This is not to say that style analysis is the secret to good writing-talent, practice, and urgency probably comprise that secret, and none of these can be taughtbut it can help at two important levels. It can provide students with discernible models of the mechanics of successful

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black prisoners, astonished that they could write such poetry as If We Must Die; prisoners had left a copy of the poem lying on the ground. The magazine asserted that the men of Attica passed around clandestine writings of their own; among them was a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching for its would-be heroic style.' Then Time quoted the first stanza of Claude McKay's poem, which McKay wrote to describe the lynchings in the South and which Winston Churchill