Download or read book Paradigms Lost Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline written by John Ivan Simon and published by Random House Value Publishing. This book was released on 1980 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradigms Lost written by John Simon and published by . This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradigms Lost Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline written by John Ivan Simon and published by Random House Value Publishing. This book was released on 1980 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Literacy written by Robert Pattison and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1984 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is original, informed, brilliantly argued, and written with real passion ... It is going to be very useful in the literacy debates in the next few years.--Richard Lanham.

Download or read book Bryson s Dictionary of Troublesome Words written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the English language's most skilled and beloved writers guides us all towards precise, mistake-free usage. In the middle 1980s Bill Bryson was a copy editor for the London Times with the brash idea that he could fill a hole in the British book market for a concise, accessible, handy guide to proper usage. A complete unknown, he nonetheless sold Penguin Books on the idea, and the result was The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, which sold decently enough on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, fifteen years later, Bill Bryson has become, well, Bill Bryson -- and his terrifically useful little book has been revised, updated and Americanized to become Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Precise, prescriptive, sometimes (like its author) amusingly prickly, this book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about our language not to maul or misuse or distort it. Move over, Strunk and White.

Download or read book Bryson s Dictionary for Writers and Editors written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling authors, a terrifically useful and readable guide to the problems of the English language most commonly encountered by editors and writers. What is the singular form of graffiti? From what mythological figure is the word “tantalize” derived? One of the English language’s most skilled writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. Covering spelling, capitalization, plurals, hyphens, abbreviations, and foreign names and phrases, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors will be an indispensable companion for all who care enough about our language not to maul, misuse, or contort it. As Bill Bryson notes, “English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.” This dictionary is an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language.

Download or read book Teaching Composition written by Gary Tate and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Do You Speak American written by Robert Macneil and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations? These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for American English—if a standard exists—is changing quickly and dramatically. On a journey that takes them from the Northeast, through Appalachia and the Deep South, and west to California, the authors observe everyday verbal interactions and in a host of interviews with native speakers glean the linguistic quirks and traditions characteristic of each area. While examining the histories and controversies surrounding both written and spoken American English, they address anxieties and assumptions that, when explored, are highly emotional, such as the growing influence of Spanish as a threat to American English and the special treatment of African-American vernacular English. And, challenging the purists who think grammatical standards are in serious deterioration and that media saturation of our culture is homogenizing our speech, they surprise us with unpredictable responses. With insight and wit, MacNeil and Cran bring us a compelling book that is at once a celebration and a potent study of our singular language. Each wave of immigration has brought new words to enrich the American language. Do you recognize the origin of 1. blunderbuss, sleigh, stoop, coleslaw, boss, waffle? Or 2. dumb, ouch, shyster, check, kaput, scram, bummer? Or 3. phooey, pastrami, glitch, kibbitz, schnozzle? Or 4. broccoli, espresso, pizza, pasta, macaroni, radio? Or 5. smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan? Or 6. vamoose, chaps, stampede, mustang, ranch, corral? 1. Dutch 2. German 3. Yiddish 4. Italian 5. Irish 6. Spanish

Download or read book The David Foster Wallace Reader written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 1443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here — with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work — essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King, and legendary stories like "The Depressed Person." Wallace's explorations of morality, self-consciousness, addiction, sports, love, and the many other subjects that occupied him are represented here in both fiction and nonfiction. Collected for the first time are Wallace's first published story, "The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen In Relation to the Bad Thing" and a selection of his work as a writing instructor, including reading lists, grammar guides, and general guidelines for his students. A dozen writers and critics, including Hari Kunzru, Anne Fadiman, and Nam Le, add afterwords to favorite pieces, expanding our appreciation of the unique pleasures of Wallace's writing. The result is an astonishing volume that shows the breadth and range of "one of America's most daring and talented writers" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) whose work was full of humor, insight, and beauty.

Download or read book Language and Human Nature written by Mark Halpern and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and Human Nature exposes a century's worth of flawed thinking about language, exhibits some of the dangers it presents, and suggests a path to recovery. It begins by examining the causes of changes in the English vocabulary. These sometimes take the form of new words, but more often that of new senses for old words. In the course of this examination, Halpern discusses a wide variety of verbal solecisms, vulgarisms, and infelicities generally. His objective is not to deplore such things, but to expose the reasons for their existence, the human traits that generate them. A large part of this book is devoted to contesting the claims of academic linguists to be the only experts in the study of language change. Language is too central to civilized life to be so deeply misunderstood without causing a multitude of troubles throughout our culture. We are currently experiencing such troubles, a number of which are examined here. The exposure of linguists' misunderstandings is not an end in itself, but a necessary first step in recovery from the confusion we are now enmeshed in. The picture of the relationship between words and thoughts that is part of the attempt to deal with language "scientifically" is partly responsible for dangerous cultural developments. The attempt by linguists to treat their subject scientifically makes them view meaning as an irritating complication to be ignored if possible. It turns them into formalists who try to understand language by studying its physical representations, with a resort to semantics only when unavoidable. With words practically stripped of their role as bearers of meaning, it becomes easy to see them as unimportant. Halpern's book is a serious critique of such oversimplified theorizing.

Download or read book Consider the Lobster written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters. "Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking, and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Download or read book Defiant Desire written by Edwin Cameron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defiant Desire records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races as they have lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression. The history of gay identity in South Africa is here in its past and present aspects: from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay "shebeen" in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; from Afrikaans love poetry to new activism. The book is a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and indispensable for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.

Download or read book The Story of Webster s Third written by Herbert C. Morton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary in 1961 set off a storm of controversy in both the popular press and in scholarly journals that was virtually unprecedented in its scope and intensity. This is the first full account of the controversy, set within the larger background of how the dictionary was planned and put together by its editor-in-chief, Philip Babcock Gove. Based on original research and interviews with the people who knew and worked with Gove, this is a human story as well as the story of the making of a dictionary. The author skilfully interweaves an account of Gove's character and working habits with the evolution of the dictionary. The reception given Webster's Third - now widely regarded as one of the greatest dictionaries of our time - illuminates public misconceptions about language and the role of dictionaries.

Download or read book Describing Prescriptivism written by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing Prescriptivism provides a topical and thought-provoking analysis of linguistic prescriptivism in British and American English, from a historical as well as present-day perspective. Focusing on usage guides and usage problems, the book takes a three-fold approach to present an in-depth analysis of the topic, featuring: a detailed study of the advice provided in usage guides over the years; an authoritative comparison of this advice with actual usage as recorded in British and American corpora, including the HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English) database – developed specifically to enable this line of study – as well as more mainstream corpora such as COCA, COHA and the BNC; a close analysis of the attitudes to particular usage problems among the general public, based on surveys distributed online through the "Bridging the Unbridgeable" research project’s blog.* With extensive case studies to illustrate and support claims throughout, this comprehensive study is key reading for students and researchers of prescriptivism, the history of English and sociolinguistics. *Found at https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/

Download or read book Towards a Standard English written by Dieter Stein and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Download or read book Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics written by Margaret Thomas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the first language, and where did it come from? Do all languages have properties in common? What is the relationship of language to thought? Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics explores how fifty of the most influential figures in the field have asked and have responded to classic questions about language. Each entry includes a discussion of the person’s life, work and ideas as well as the historical context and an analysis of his or her lasting contributions. Thinkers include: Aristotle Samuel Johnson Friedrich Max Müller Ferdinand de Saussure Joseph H. Greenberg Noam Chomsky Fully cross-referenced and with useful guides to further reading, this is an ideal introduction to the thinkers who have had a significant impact on the subject of Language and Linguistics.

Download or read book Barbarians at the Gate written by Patricia Donaher and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of language attitudes is the investigation of beliefs expressed about the nature of language and its diverse usages, how these attitudes came to exist and persist, and how these attitudes shape social action and policy. Language attitude studies have illuminated our understanding of racial issues, social and economic stratification, cultural stereotypes, educational issues, folk linguistics, and, more recently, popular culture. This volume is an examination of four intersections in language attitudes research: Authority, Affiliation, Authenticity, and Accommodation. In each section, the contributors introduce new dimensions to the study of language attitudes while providing examples of the ways in which the study of language attitudes can continue to inform and shape our understanding of language diversity.