In the last 20 years, research on language has gone from an area that specialists in composition and rhetoric took quite seriously to one that specialists now pay little attention to. This shift can be accounted for because (1) some teachers appear to have given up on using any insights from linguistic analysis in their teaching of composition; (2) most composition teachers believe that linguistic work based in North America has little to do with improving students' writing skills; (3) those not studying grammars not originating in North America have not been careful in their use of terms associated with these grammars; (4) teachers are unwilling to risk taking any control over texts away from their students; (5) linguistic research has fallen on the losing side in the debate over quantitative or qualitative studies; and (6) it is the context that is focused on most among all the elements of a rhetorical situation. Researchers working with linguistics can attract a broader audience by doing more research that relates aspects of texts to contexts that produce those texts; helping composition teachers understand and move closer to remediating surface errors in students' essays; helping to characterize the stages students go through when they progress toward writing lexically dense prose; and doing work to help people understand the nature of dialects. (RS)