Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

A survey of 210 professional communicators measured their sensitivity to the problem of readability, especially as it has been treated in the plain English movement (the drive to improve written materials and to make the unreadable readable). The results of the survey showed that 23% of the communicators rated the plain language concept…

Philosophical works and sociological writings from the seventeenth through the twentieth century are analyzed in this paper to learn the degree to which their use of generics (linguistic terms such as "mankind" that are used to refer to all humans) can be said to have actual reference to all adults without consideration of sex. The paper notes…

The use of rhetoric as a focus in teaching writing, working for understanding, not obedience to rules is discussed and illustrated. Rhetoric is defined as the art of making choices among available means of expression. The major implication of the definition is said to be that rhetoric, as the art of selection, is primarily concerned with…

The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing…

Notes research showing that narration and opinion writing are two different crafts and that children differentiate between the two when they write. (FL)

This article discusses punctuation in Spanish, specifically rules for the use of the comma, the colon, and the semi-colon. The rules for the placement of prosodic and orthographic stress are also discussed. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Indicates a strong relationship between the various aspects of language proficiency and social class and race and discusses the complex relationships among aspects of language proficiency. (RB)

Describes a "writer's hotline" telephone program operated at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in which English faculty address community members' writing problems. Benefits have included increased publicity for the department, improved relationships with the community, and gains in expertise in handling questions of English usage. (DF)

Examines several texts to determine whether they are still open to the charge of being sexist in what they teach about language and imply about women's roles. (Author/RL)

Considers language growth of secondary school students in terms of their using language to organize real experiences, their awareness of audience, and their ability to manage language for specific purposes and situations. Provides anecdotes of classroom conditions that promoted such student language growth. (RL)

Points out the subtle yet overt sexism of "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, and discusses the adverse effects of sexist language. (DD)

This paper analyzes a selected bibliography on the Chinese dialect literature. It discussed the role dialects have played in development of Chinese language reform; the form in which major dialects are written; subject matter written about, and statistical correlation between dialects, subject matter and forms of writing. (CHK)