Knowing how to express oneself properly is a necessity in today's technical world. The technical writer must use correct grammar and exact language in his descriptions of precise, technical subjects. He must learn how to adapt his personal style to the impact he wants to make. In addition, he must learn how to communicate to various levels of audiences. Also, he should learn to use graphic aids in the presentation of an article.

Much of punctuation is arbitrary, except for the period and question mark. However, there are sound rules worth mastering, for the use of punctuation to make things clearer or reading easier. Included here from the author's book The Careful Writer are commentary on use of the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation marks, and semicolon.

Traditional courses and course-books for teaching English as a foreign language are often too general and grammar-orientated for students of technology from overseas. The students are well motivated for learning how to communicate effectively within their technical contexts. To harness their enthusiasm, courses on communication skills need to emphasize functions as well as forms of language.

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.

This study deals with an investigation of adult ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity and, as a corollary, the developing ability of children to understand these same linguistic structures. Current linguistic theories based on the insights of transformational-generative grammarians led by N. Chomsky (1957) have been concerned with developing rules which account for adult native speakers' intuitions about their language. Abilities imputed to adults include the recognition of paraphrases, anomalous sentences, synonymous sentences, and ambiguous sentences (Katz, 1972) . As noted by Mayher (1970) , for centuries philosophers and linguists have been hypothesizing the developmental aspects of language acquisition. Current linguistic theories it possible to understand the complexities of language and investigate their development. The rules of language, which are tacitly acquired, constitute a grammar of competence or a competence model. Grammarians make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speakerhearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) (N. Chomsky, 1965, p. 47) . Therefore, one focus of this investigation was the tapping of linguistic competence for the 40 adults and 50 children interviewed, all of whom were native speakers of American English.

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toward study of language as an autonomous system.1 As a consequence, many linguists make solution of problems within grammar prior to study of problems having to do with use of grammar (which are postponed indefinitely) [p. 40]. Hymes particularly takes Chomsky and transformational generative linguists to task for not recognizing the principle of heuristic priority of function over grammar (p. 45). To Hymes, grammar is a subordinate structure. Consequently, Hymes concludes that linguistics must look to disciplines such as rhetoric for heuristic help. In a little-noticed but important article entitled The Grammar of Coher-

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`Why Johnny can't write?' (Newsweek, December 5, 1975) is answered by a Technical Johnny, whose rebuttal shows that he needs help rather than censure. Suggestions for improving such poorly literate writing are addressed to engineers, technicians, professional communicators, and engineering managers.

There is nothing mysterious about punctuation. It is based upon simple principles. The “rules” which one can find in all sorts of books are usually true enough, but they tend to make the matter seem unnecessarily complicated, and they do not show why they are true. The more practical approach is to consider certain typical situations and what they naturally require. The important thing, of course, is good sentence-structure. What correct punctuation does is to keep that structure unmistakably clear for the innocent reader who does not know what is coming.

Standardization in typography, spelling, abbreviations, and citations provides a semblance of uniformity to a journal. Standardization guarantees greater flexibility in the use of copyeditors in an office that publishes several journals. However, journals in different disciplines lend themselves to different formats and styles: a large journal with many articles is more efficiently set in double-column pages of small type, while a journal containing many equations requires a single-column page with generous size type and citation of references in the text by author and date instead of by number. Such deviations from routine standardization keep copyeditors alert. Perhaps the most important area of standardization in a redactory office is in the procedures of checking galley and page proof. There can be no deviation from standard rules of proofreading. Finally, economics in publishing may dictate standardization in the future. Authors may some day be “compositors” when their typescript becomes the camera-ready copy. More standardization, not less, in the original typescript will then be required.

The traditional instruction of technical report writing leans heavily on the conventions of English grammar and on principles advocated by grammarians, journalists, and literature scholars. The effect has been so strong—particularly in North America—that the word “technical” in technical writer, technical writing, and technical reports has literally become almost meaningless. This article discusses a few important differences between technical and nontechnical writing. It also explains some shortcomings of the traditional instruction and suggests methods of improvement.

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Most technically orientated students are never exposed to lessons in effective technical writing skills. Yet, knowing how to express oneself properly is a necessity in today's technical world. The technical writer must use correct grammar and exact language in his descriptions of precise, technical subjects. He must learn how to adapt his personal style to the impact he wants to make. In addition, he must also learn how to communicate to various levels of audiences, for not all of his readers will possess the same knowledge about a subject. Also, he must learn to use graphic aids in the presentation of an article.

THE WORDS PALINDROMIE palindromic refer to a well-known formal pattern that is shared bv certain words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, verses: e.g., Odo tenet mulum, madidam mappam tenet Anna, Anna tenet mappam madidam, mulum tenet Odo.' It is this formal pattern, which always occurs at least on the level of the letters in these language units, that is important here. The palindrome is essentially a reversal pattern that pivots around a center. However, since the quantity of letters in a palindrome mayv be odd or even in number, the center of a palindrome might be one of two kinds. If there is an odd number of letters, the center will be a non-repeated letter, the c in A man, a plan, a canal-Panama!2 And if there is an even number of letters, the center will be a point in space, it were, between two identical letters, between the two a's in Subi dura a rudibus.3 Except for their reversal pattern, the twofold nature of their centers, the equality reversed identity of their two halves, palindromes are not fixed formally are highly variable in length complexitnr.4 Indeed, a palindrome may vary from these ideal conditions still be a palindrome. For instance, the comma the word and are notipart of the reversal pattern in as Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.5 The possibility of such variations, which are generally held to a minimum, might be a further characteristic of the palindrome, inasmuch the demands of syntax meaning sometimes make them unavoidable.

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A sentence should have from the beginning a definite plan to be kept clearly in view. When a writer becomes tangled in his grammar and goes off the track, we may believe that he started without being sure of what he wanted to say. Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1849: “A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”

The roles and importance of sentence-coupling conjunctions in general technical writing are analyzed. Based on a previous paper (which explained the meanings of these coupling words), this paper examines ways of improving logical argument, of providing continuity of thought between sentences, and of improving readability. Useful redundancy and punctuation are also briefly discussed in relation to coupling words. Comparative tables of incidental couplers, determiners, and redundant couplers are provided as practical aids to the technical writer and editor.

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I. Traditional Images of Women Image One: The Wife Little Woman, Sally Benson The Angel over the Right Shoulder, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Cutting the Jewish Bride's Hair, Ruth Whitman The Bridal Veil, Alice Cary Aunt Rosanna's Rocker, Nicholosa Mohr Migration, Carol Gregory A Wife's Story, Bharati Mukherjee Secretive, Jane Augustine Driving to Oregon, Jean Thompson Facing the Music, Larry Brown Marks, Linda Pastan. Image Two: The Mother I Sing the Body Electric! Ray Bradbury On the First Night, Erica Jong Transition, Toi Derricotte The Mother, Gwendolyn Brooks Pressure for Pressure, Ellen Lesser Expensive Gifts, Sue Miller Daddy, Jan Clausen The Envelope, Maxine Kumin Between the Lines, Ruth Stone I Ask My Mother to Sing, Li-Young Lee Flower Feet, Ruth Fainlight Speculation, Gloria C Oden Girl, Jamaica Kincaid Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone, Gloria E Anzaldua Dear Toni Instead of a Letter, Audre Lorde Souvenir, Jayne Anne Phillips Bridging, Max Apple Grace, Vicki Sears. Image Three: Woman on a Pedestal Susanna and the Elders, Adelaide Crapsey In an Artist's Studio, Christina Rossetti The Glamour Trap, George Lefferts Pretty, Alta The End of a Career, Jean Stafford Song, William Blake Baby, You Were Great! Kate Wilhelm La Belle Dame sans Merci, John Keats The Loreley, Heinrich Heine Erzulie Freida, Zora Neale Hurston Image Four: The Sex Object The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, Irwin Shaw Brooklyn, Paule Marshall One off the Short List, Doris Lessing The Patriarch, Colette Metonymy, Julie Fay From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou With no immediate cause, Ntozake Shange From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Linda Brent [Harriet Jacobs] From The Maimie Papers, Maimie Pinzer Poem about My Rights, June Jordan Image Five: Women without Men Miss Gee, W.H. Auden Bedquilt, Dorothy Canfield Fisher The Women Men Don't See, James Tiptree, Jr Silk-Workers, Agnes Smedley My Lover Is a Woman, Pat Parker Trespassing, Valerie Miner Home, Shirley Ann Grau The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin The Widow's Lament in Springtime, William Carlos Williams Mourning to Do, May Sarton Old Things, Bobbie Ann Mason. II. Woman Becoming A Prison gets to be a friend, Emily Dickinson Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen Unlearning to Not Speak, Marge Piercy Seventeen Syllables, Hisaye Yamamoto Three Women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman A Allegory on Wimmen's Rights, Marietta Holley Miss Rosie, Lucille Clifton I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman, Susan Griffin From Work: A Story of Experience, Louisa May Alcott From Gifts of Power, Rebecca Jackson A Person as Well as a Female, Jade Snow Wong Spelling, Margaret Atwood Trifles, Susan Glaspell Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich Hope, Nadya Aisenberg Homecoming, Martha Collins A Woman at the Window, Nellie Wong Present, Sonia Sanchez Beyond What, Alice Walker Three Dreams in the Desert under a Mimosa Tree, Olive Schreiner Woman, Alaide Foppa. Afterword: Writing Images/Images of Writing by Jean Ferguson Carr Suggestions for Further Reading Works Cited in Introductions Works Cited in Previous Editions Reference Works Periodicals Anthologies of Women's Writings Selected Recent Literary Criticism and Theory Acknowledgements Author/Title Index.

ANMC (American National Metric Council), has spent considerable effort and some funds in trying to establish consistent spelling for the basic measures of length (meter/metre) and volume (liter/litre). Here is a set of arguments that was prepared by a task force of ANMC to indicate the reasoning on both sides of the question.

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For anyone who has witnessed the success of many young men and women who were taught to fail, has watched them lay claim to their talents, meet their commitments and set out with a plan in their minds, the widespread pessimism about whether Open Admissions can work, as they put it, is baffling. Especially baffling is the fact that this pessimism was deep-rooted even before any of the new students had stepped on our campuses. By now, there is a literature of pessimism, a theology-more precisely, a social science-of despair that serves the purposes of those who have already rejected the social policy implicit in Open Admissions. Unfortunately, the debate about Open Admissions has been and is being carried on in the language of those who oppose it: in the alphabet of numbers, the syntax of print-outs, the transformations of graphs and tables, the language, in particular, of a prestigious group of social scientists who perceive through their language truths that even they seem, at times, unwilling to hear, much as scientists of another kind in another

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THE NON-LINGUIST who has conscientiously tried to keep abreast of developments in linguistic theory may well be ready to give up. Linguistics, especially transformational grammar, has matured recently at an alarming rate, so that transformational grammarians may seem to have developed increasingly narrow interests and, moreover, to have become so embroiled in the muddy business of securing their own positions, digging themselves in on a narrow front, that whether they are involved in civil war or are continuing to extend the frontiers of linguistic knowledge is often very unclear-even to themselves. I fancy that scarcely a single transformationalist will bother to raise his head as Professor Chafe wings his way overhead firing enthusiastically but erratically in all directions. The outsider is much more likely to notice the high-flier, and he needs some help in assessing the significance of Chafe's sally-perhaps it would not be out of place to give him at the same time some reports from the transformational trenches, and to assure him that all is still well there. I shall assume that he is reasonably familiar with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures1 and the main developments in transformational grammar up to about 1965, when Chomsky published his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.2 Not that I believe the college English teacher has any (narrow professional) reason to bother much about contemporary linguistics. On the contrary, recent developments in transformational grammar should make it perfectly clear that there is no hope whatever of making direct use of that approach to linguistics in English teaching-at any rate not along the lines of existing attempts. And Chafe's work seems even less relevant.

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A good many teachers of technical writing are guilty of blindly following tradition and convention in teaching students to rely on the outline as an organizing device, in categorically condemning the passive voice, in magnifying the importance of form and format, and in insisting on a set of inflexible rules for grammar and style that ignore widespread usage. Implicit in the attack on shibboleths is a plea for honest pragmatism in determining effectiveness in technical writing.

In the sixties in all English-speaking countries there was a marked swing away from formal methods of teaching writing and a corresponding interest in methods that are broadly termed creative. More and more teachers were persuaded that can't write writing, and that you only write well when you write what keenly interests you. The central responsibility of teachers became the arousing of interest in each writing task, thereby engaging the mental-emotional energy and creative resources of students. I have supported this emphasis, especially against attempts to push the secondary schools into comprehensive study of one or other of the new systems of grammar. But I have not seen any need to go as far as those who now exclude from their classes all reference

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