“Voice” is no longer a hot term in composition journals. Yet it continues to deserve scholarly attention, in part because it is still often referred to in classrooms and seems applicable to new forms of electronic communication. At the same time, we should avoid taking an either/or stand on the usefulness of “voice” as a term. This is a case where we should embrace contraries, by advocating concepts of “voice” on certain occasions and resisting the term on others.

its principles in the linguistic formulation of Newspeak in 1984, I am surprised to have searched Orwell scholarship unsuccessfully for a specifically rhetorical treatment of the essay. Briefly analytic (and critical) is AlbertJ. Brouse's 1974 note registering his disagreement with Orwell's criticism of Harold Laski's prose in the former's list of not especially bad examples of English as it is now habitually written. Brouse feels that Orwell should be stripped of the golden essay award for the most anthologized essay in college texts on the basis of a miscount of negatives in one of the pieces Orwell attacks (Brouse argues that there are really seven negatives in the sentence rather than, as Orwell would have it, five). The closest to a developed analysis is Cleo McNelly's 1977 On Not Teaching Orwell, in which the first two sentences of Politics are shown, in a long paragraph, to be rhetorically complex, and thus, from McNelly's perspective (following Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations of the same year), unsuitable for the basic or developmental writing student, as is the entire essay, in that Orwell will fail [the student] as a guide, if not as a model as well (557). Shaughnessy writes of Orwell's plain style, To urge a student to emulate such 'simplicity' without exploring it thoroughly is to push him far beyond his verbal resources and encourage the very formalese a writer such as Orwell was careful to avoid (196-97). McNelly's and Shaughnessy's points, in terms of my essay, bear, as noted, on the uses of Politics as a model or

IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise: