While rhetoricians are familiar with Kenneth Burke's epigram Ad bellum purificandum, little attention has been paid to why the “purification of war” would be Burke's purpose in A Grammar of Motives. Yet the Grammar, with its theory of dramatism, was written throughout a conflict Burke called “the mightiest war the human race will ever experience.” This article recovers Burke's wartime writings and explores the impact of World War II on his intellectual development. Arguing that Burke's dialectical project was conceived as a specific, hortatory response to the absolutism of total war, it recontextualizes Burkean themes of ambiguity, transcendence, dialectic, and action as it “rhetoricizes” dramatism, placing it within its original cultural/material conversational parlor.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Abstract This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Our students need to be able to adhere to standard written English to succeed in their other classes and to get jobs at the end of their schooling, and it’s the responsibility of writing teachers to help them do so. In this article, the author provides a research-based theoretical underpinning for effective grammar instruction as well as several specific strategies—based on experience and research—for addressing grammar productively.

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The English poet-critic John Dryden (1631–1700) took a keen interest in refining the mother tongue. As a literary critic, he was particularly concerned with the contrast between the sound of the vernacular and that of Latin. This study establishes a connection between Dryden’s observations on sound and the recommendations concerning elocution found in such seventeenth-century rhetorics as Some Instructions Concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) by Obadiah Walker, in order to appreciate Dryden’s use of sound in his own poems, I argue that one should also take into account the phonetic theory provided by contemporary grammars. The study thus pays tribute to the fact that in the age of Dryden the concerns of rhetoric and grammar were closely interwoven.

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This article describes two strategies for grounding grammar instruction in students’ lifelong experience as users of language. In both cases, students participate as active decision-makers in the process of analyzing conventions of language use.

The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of because. Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate students and of 61 samples by a control group showed that first, only African American subjects used indirection; second, paratactic functions of because were significantly more prevalent among African American students than in the control group; and third, among African American students, those from low-income families showed statistically significant higher frequencies of the use of both indirection and paratactic because. A relationship of hierarchy in the uses of indirection and paratactic because was also evident in the data.

Speaking Students," an article appearing nine years after Power's endorsement of a "more direct, more didactic" approach (41), Blau and Hall offer guidelines that affirm flexible priorities and the role of direct tutoring strategies. In the sessions analyzed in their study, directness proved helpful to meeting the ESL students' need for cultural information and for avoiding the related tendency for Socratic questioning to deteriorate into "trolling for the right answer" (33). Another notable finding was that line-by-line sentence-level tutoring tended to lead beyond surfacelevel errors to discussions of meaning and thus to the resolution of the frequently noted conflict between the agendas of ESL learners, eager for error correction (35; see also Harris and Silva 530-531) and the agendas of tutors, who are typically trained to focus first on whole-essay concerns. From these findings, Blau and Hall conclude that tutors should "be comfortable with the directive approach, especially with local concerns such as grammar, punctuation, idioms, and word usage," and with "working line-by-line" (42). They emphasize that their guidelines are not rules (43) and that tutors who find themselves "editing" have gone too far with the directive approach (41). However, they also suggest the unlikelihood that teachers and tutors would fall into the role of editor: "No good writing teacher would correct students' errors for them or appropriate their texts. Perhaps the true distinction here is between editing and teaching, rather than between directive and non-directive" (24-25).

Instant Messaging (IM) features informal writing styles such as the omission of punctuation. Punctuation plays an important role in representing prosody and facilitating syntactic processing during communication. The discrepancy between the recognized importance and actual inadequate usage of punctuation in IM calls for establishing punctuation convention for more effective online communication. The research uniquely reported here addressed two research questions. The first was whether punctuation had an impact on the effectiveness of IM. The results of an empirical study showed that the majority of surveyed participants perceived punctuation to be somewhat important. This led to the investigation of the second research question: how to restore omitted punctuation in instant messaging to help develop punctuation convention effectively? We designed and implemented a technical solution for recovering punctuation based on heuristics rules and an evaluation of this approach showed satisfactory performance. A detailed analysis of punctuation in archived instant messages revealed several patterns of omitted punctuation. The findings of this research not only advance our understanding of the stylistic convention, but also provide positive evidence for establishing punctuation convention in IM. As IM continues to pervade daily communication, punctuation convention in IM deserves closer attention.

This study examines the frequency with which 12 writing tutors used hints in their suggestions to 12 engineering students in 13 interactions about technical writing. Of the 424 suggestions tutors made, 106 were hints. Using Weizman's model as a guide, the study describes three types of hints that tutors used: evaluations, general rules, and elisions. It also investigates the benefits that tutors receive from using those types of hints and examines the problems for students that can arise when tutors state their suggestions as hints. Combined with previous research findings, the findings of this study suggest that tutors should pair mildly negative evaluations and general rules with direct suggestions, and tutors should avoid strongly negative evaluations, i.e., criticisms. The findings also suggest that tutors can elude suggestions and provide words and phrases for students' documents but that they should only do this occasionally to model effective tone or syntax.

In this article, I examine Lynn Truss’s book of punctuation rules and faux pas, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, contemplating the complex relationships among class, academics, and language snobbery. I don’t refute Truss’s lessons on punctuation. Instead, I use her text as a jumping-off point for discussion of the social issues embedded in her guide and others like it.

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Today’s students are arriving on college campuses with little knowledge of grammar and usage, so instructors may need to employ alternate strategies of games and electronic activities to provide the practice such students need.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly canceled in July 2002 and became the subject of many news articles. The article uses a coding system to analyze seven magazine and newspaper articles that appeared shortly after the WHI study was halted. The coding shows a high incidence of concrete nouns in the journalistic accounts and looks at the ways the syntax of their attributions are ordered to emphasize vivid nouns, the ways their verbs contribute to narrative, and some of the narrative devices employed in the journalistic reporting.

Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as “lively” and “creative.” It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar could be written, because particular rhetorical effects too often depend on context, perceived intention, and so on. Moreover, such a grammar will not be written until language describing a writer or a writer’s style can be translated into language describing a reader’s response. Even so, some stylistic effects can be linked to some syntactic structures, and parataxis is one of them. Bakhtin’s method of teaching—showing how the same content expressed in different ways can have contrasting rhetorical effects—is sound. Although he focuses on pedagogy, his own language suggests a larger aim: the replacement of bureaucratic language with the language of the people, perhaps even the liberalization of Soviet society.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related oppositions, such as Vygotsky’s spontaneous and scientific concepts, as well as Bakhtin’s early antithesis of life and art, the author emphasizes Bakhtin’s interest in relational (dialogical) rather than formal understandings of grammar, style, and literature. The author concludes with three possible implications of Bakhtin’s pedagogical essay for writing teachers: (a) that we acknowledge the creative expression already present in the everyday speech of our students, (b) that we reconsider the specifically dialogical use of linguistic and literary models, and (c) that we attend to the performative aspect of style and the teaching of style.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas—sentence structure and reader comprehension—and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles.

The research reported here examined word study as an approach to spelling instruction. In particular, the researchers investigated kindergarten children’s transfer of specific words, word knowledge, concepts about print, and strategies for spelling unknown words to their self-selected journal writing.

Abstract The rise of Lech Walesa from shipyard electrician to leader of “Solidarity,” international icon of freedom, and first president of democratic Poland was closely bound up with rhetoric. Walesa's idiosyncratic verbal style galvanized the masses and successfully confronted communist propaganda. The revolution of the workers on the Baltic coast was to a large extent a revolution in language. Walesa was also a skilled negotiator. As president, however, he was a controversial figure; his conception of democracy as a continuing war of words is widely credited with spelling the end of the idealistic “Solidarity” era. Today, allegations remain that Walesa was an agent provocateur and that the Polish revolution may have been a provocation that got out of hand. Some allege that Walesa's myth was a creation of Western media, a function of people's desires, and an accident of the historical moment. While there is no proof that any of these allegations are true and the documentary record reveals Walesa's undeniable rhetorical prowess and political talent, his case provides material for reflection on the relationship between history, rhetoric, and political agency.

Focusing on the issue of readability, this article examines problems that readability formulas present to the technical communicator, especially in terms of interaction with government agencies, and focuses on readability formula requirements mandated by The Office of Health and Industry programs [OHIP] for medical technology product support literature. Because the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid formulas are widely available, they are probably the ones most frequently used. Contemporary readability scholars have overlooked the Golub Syntactic Density Formula, which evaluates prose according to a sentence's syntax at a deeper level than the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word. The authors recommend it as a tool for evaluating readability. How it might be applied with current computer applications is discussed.

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future tenses is examined and six functions of tense choice are isolated. This analysis suggests that tense marking is actually more complex than previous claims have maintained and that tense choice serves to encode (a) temporal, (b) rhetorical, and (c) structural processes in the scientific text. Tense choice is therefore part of the communicative repertoire of the scientific writer, which writers use to create and communicate information, and which is responsive to the rhetorical demands of communicating about science.

404 RHETORICA grado le scarse attestazioni oratorie dal momento che questa pseudoquintilianea é, accanto alia XIII declamazione di Libanio, l'unica che possediamo sull'argomento. Per questo motivo un'importanza preponderante viene assegnata nella declamazione al pathos, al conseguimento del quale concorre un ampio uso del color poeticus: le scelte linguistiche ed espressive richiamano ampiamente Virgilio e Ovidio, un po' meno di frequente Seneca trágico, la cui memoria era tuttavia ineludibile dato il rilievo concesso all'argomento nel Thyestes. Di notazioni di carattere lingüístico e intertestuale (in qualche caso indispensabili a comprendere un testo non privo di oscuritá nella sua paradossalitá: cf., ad es., la n. 46 a proposito di 5, 2) é ricco il commento che tuttavia, come indica lo stesso S., «non si propone come un commento esaustivo , ma come un sussidio per l'intellezione di un testo sempre impegnativo, spesso arduo» (p. 30): rivolto agli studenti oltre che agli studiosi, esso offre perció la traduzione delle citazioni greche e anche di quelle latine che non siano immediatamente comprensibili (come dei titoli stessi delle opere dalle quali sono tratte). II tono del commento, come quello della traduzione, che privilegia uno stile colloquiale, é piano ed esplicativo, con frequenti delucidazioni del senso generale del periodo, il che, al di la dell'informazione, rende il volume chiaro e di piacevole lettura. II testo seguíto, in attesa di quello criticamente riveduto dallo stesso S. di tutte le Declamationes maiores, con traduzione e note, di prossima pubblicazione per i tipi dell'UTET, é quello di Hákanson (1982), seppure con un maggior numero di modifiche rispetto al primo volume della serie; la bibliografía é ampia e aggiornata al 2003. Antonella Borgo Universita Federico II (Napoli) Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xi + 326 pp. Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), vi + 212 pp. When Ben Jonson, then at the height of his reputation, visited William Drummond of Hawthornden in the winter of 1618/19, he was not slow to offer the Scots poet advice. Among his more forceful admonitions we find: "He recommended to my reading Quintilian (who, he said, would tell me all the faults of my verses as if he had lived with me)" and "that Quintilian's 6, 7, 8 books were not only to be read, but altogether digested." The precise resonance of this will be lost on most modern readers, but much of it could readilybe recovered by consulting Peter Mack's excellent Elizabethan Rhetoric. There we find that in the early modern period "University statutes require the study of classical manuals of the whole of rhetoric. At Cambridge where the first of the four years stipulated for the BA was devoted to rhetoric, the set Reviews 405 texts were Quintilian, Hermogenes, or any other book of Cicero's speeches" (p. 51). The name of Quintilian is indeed so familiar that it is unnecessary to spell out that the precise reference is to his Institutio oratoria, second only to books by Cicero (or the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium) among the libraries of deceased Oxford and Cambridge scholars in the era. If the Institutio was not the prescribed text-book, it seems commonly to have been one of the principal authorities cited to support the one that was (pp. 52-3). Moreover, when we examine the English-language rhetoric manuals of the time, by such as Thomas Wilson, William Fulwood, and Angel Day, we find that they are all ultimately based on the classical Latin style manual, "found principally in Rhetorica ad Herrenium book IV and Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, books VIII and IX" (p. 77). So Jonson was not quite telling his host to go back to his grammar school studies - Quintilian was more advanced than their curriculum. But he was sending him back to one of the fundamental university style manuals of the day - which may not have been entirely tactful of him. Mack explains that his book "aims to contribute to the history of read­ ing and writing by showing how techniques learned in the grammar school and at university (largely through the study of classical literary texts) were used in...

Historians generally agree that causality is central to historical writing. The fact that many school history students have difficulty handling and expressing causal relations is therefore of concern. That is, whereas historians tend to favor impersonal, abstract structures as providing suitable explanations for historical events and states of affairs, students often focus on human “wants and desires.” The author argues that linguistic analysis can offer powerful insights into how successful students use grammar and vocabulary to build different types of causal explanations as they move through secondary schooling. In particular, the author shows how functionally oriented linguistic analysis makes it possible to discriminate between “narrative” and “analytical” explanations, to distinguish between “enabling” and “determining” types of causality, and to reveal the value of assessing degrees of causal impact.

Rhetorical grammar analysis encourages students to view writing as a material social practice in which meaning is actively made, rather than passively relayed or effortlessly produced. The study of rhetorical grammar can demonstrate to students that language does purposeful, consequential work in the world—work that can be learned and applied.

Contrary to literary historians, humanist influences did not produce modern English prose style. Instead, technical or utilitarian discourse is inextricable from the development of modern English prose style. Modern English resulted from written text shaped by five factors: (a) brevity induced from accounting/administrative format; (b) aural/oral-based text, written to be heard and seen, that produced conversational style; (c) persistence of indigenous subject-verb-object syntax found in the earliest English documents; (d) a growing Renaissance book market of literate middle-class readers responding to speech-based prose; and (e) English scriptural renditions of the late Renaissance that associated colloquial speech with Protestantism. Of all writing produced before 1700, only a small amount was humanistic; the bulk was utilitarian. The Royal Society’s demand for “plain English” prevailed because the call for precise language by these early scientists reflected the indigenous nature of a plain English that had surfaced as early as 900.

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This article suggests ways of writing a truly effective cover letter, an extremely important document in the search for a job. First, features gleaned from 13 model letters in technical writing textbooks yield figures on the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs per letter, plus the average number of words per sentence and paragraph, information helpful to those with little or no knowledge of how to write a strong cover letter. Second, the article surveys what the textbook writers offer as advice about the rhetorical principles that should be employed in composing cover letters. One piece of advice given by almost all of the experts is that writers should try to exude an energetic attitude, yet these same authorities do not delineate just how to display such a posture in the letters themselves. Third, examination of the letters reveals that one way that experts insert verve into cover letters is to use verbals, particularly gerunds, participles, and infinitives. In fact, 92.58% of the sentences in the 13 model letters have some type of verbal in them. The advantage of employing verbals is that while they are used for other parts of speech, they still retain the residue of action in their meaning. Fourth, the article describes the results of a survey to determine the acceptance of such constructions in the minds of two sets of readers: first-year writing students and third-year technical writing students. In both groups, more than 75% of the students preferred a paragraph with verbals in it over a paragraph devoid of verbals. Finally, the article suggests “sentence combining” as a procedure for teaching technical writing students how to combine basic sentences into verbals to garner variety and economy, one of the hallmarks of technical writing.

Subject matter experts, under the influence of modernist notions of authorship, often view technical writers as mere grammar and punctuation specialists and marginalize them as their ignorant “other. ” Technical writers, on the other hand, as rhetoricians occupying a liminal space between different disciplines, can understand different disciplinary rhetorics. If subject matter experts, instead of marginalizing technical writers, would view them as liminal subjects who are knowledgeable in different disciplinary rhetorics, then technical writers, through liminal practice, may be able to use their knowledge of audience and rhetoric to improve the quality of documentation.

This essay focuses on the grammar–rhetoric–composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth–century institution of higher education in Mexico, to argue for a more amply conceived set of colonialist beginnings for American composition. As an emergent site for North American composition–rhetoric, Tlaltelolco launched phenomena familiar to contemporary scholarship, for example composition-rhetoric as attractor for public debates about race and class, as sponsor of debased curricula for people of color, and as re–enforcer of linkages among color, class, aptitude, and local discourse practices.

The article examines the processses involved in essay-writing by comparing it with the the process by which organic chemistry synthesis schemes are solved. In the process of writing an essay, the author uses knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, and discourse to creatively organize and then produce a paper. In the process of generating a synthesis, the chemist uses knowledge of structure, functional group reactivity, and reaction mechanisms to creatively organize and then produce a synthesis. Both the writing of an essay and the design of an organic synthesis are goal-oriented, nonlinear, recursive activities that lead to a product that is greater than the sum of the individual elements involved in its creation.

This paper explains the simplification of a theory of punctuation for college-level instruction.

When faced with the tasks of reading and writing a complex technical paper, many nonnative scientists and engineers who have a solid background in English grammar and vocabulary lack an adequate knowledge of commonly used structural patterns at the discourse level. In this paper, we propose a novel computer software tool that can assist these people in the understanding and construction of technical papers, by automatically identifying the structure of writing in different fields and disciplines. The system is tested using research article abstracts and is shown to be a fast, accurate, and useful aid in the reading and writing process.

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Helping one to imagine himself or herself a writer is much more complex than nurturing a more stable grasp of sentence clarity or spelling. Rather, it involves the ability to nurture the personal introspection and cultural scrutiny that makes writing a source for reflection and transformation.

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups. These results were used in Study 1b to develop a tutorial attended by an independent group of students preparing to write a standardized writing exam. The intervention had a positive effect on their test performance. Participants reported the tutorial to be useful, committed fewer errors on most of the criteria, and had a higher probability of passing the exam. It was concluded that this type of tutorial is beneficial to students who are preparing for such exams and may have wider educational use for those seeking assistance with their writing skills.

Punctuation is often learned without teaching and more often not learned despite much teaching. Jointly, these facts suggest that real punctuation decision rules are very different from and probably much simpler than the rules we teach. This article argues that the punctuation system does have features that generally make systems learnable, such as binary contrasts, limitation of parallel categories to seven or fewer options, and repeated application of the same criterion to different kinds of entities. The simplicity that allows some readers to learn this system unconsciously also makes it possible to figure out consciously the system’s underlying information–management rationales, which in turn motivate both conscious learning and use.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the study of English was accelerating rapidly. At this time linguistic theories identified which members of society warranted inclusion in the political process. Conservative men of letters, like Samuel Johnson, claimed the lower and middle classes lacked cultural capital. To counter this linguistic class-ification, William Cobbett published A Grammar of the English Language, an enormously popular text meant to teach laborers how to write. Mostly neglected as a "grammarian" or rhetorician today, Cobbett was in fact a forerunner to current linguistic trends that stress literacy's social and political formulations.

This article describes three approaches with which grammar may be welcomed back into the composition classroom.

Previously, D. Leonard and J. Gilsdorf (1990) presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation problems, pronoun-antecedent (dis)agreement, and various examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the "botheration level" of each usage "error"; their conclusions were that: 1) academics are (nearly) always bothered by usage "errors" more than executives; and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least were evolving over time into acceptable English usage. Setting aside for now the problem of ongoing language change and its causes, the article focuses on the problem of predicting what will remain unchanged in language-usage rules and proposes an explanation for why certain rules will remain unchanged. This problem is critically important for anyone who is mentoring the writing of younger people, people whose primary audience will not follow our rules, but rather the rules of the next generation of readers.

Abstract This essay traces the reception of a new grammatical‐rhetorical theory of personification in the canon of textbooks widely used to teach vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century. Invented, in 1751, by James Harris’ Hermes, a work in universal grammar, this new doctrine contributed to the increased masculinity of standard literate performance. Hermes increased the representivity of gendered pronouns and required a contradictory use of gendered personification as if it were both literal and figurative. As a result, two distinctive relations to language were made possible. For men, grammar and rhetoric appear in strict opposition and are always representative of their experience of language. Women literates, who were not taken into account by the masculinist sensibility of Hermes, were assigned, de facto, an anomalous position and a potentially more critical relation to language. The texts of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Sarah Willis ("Fanny Fern “) provide examples which demonstrate that women recognized and profited from their anomalous difference, which suggests the creation of a historically specific l'ecriture feminine.