Routledge Landmark Essays on Speech and Writing (Landmark Essays Series)

Classical rhetoric was originally all about speech; then as the new technology emerged, it took an interest in writing. We are at a kind of mirror moment now. The present field of composition and rhetoric has been preoccupied with writing for the last fifty or more years, but scholars are looking once again at speech and how it relates to writing.At this moment, then, we are inheritors of research showing that writing can be thought of as different and yet not different from speech. In this Landmark Essays volume, Peter Elbow, a leading expert on speech and writing, gathers a selection of classic essays that show the main streams of thinking that scholars have published about speech and writing. Through the interdisciplinary essays included, he invites readers to think critically about the relationship between speech, writing, and our notion of literacy. Review " Landmark Essays on Speech and Writing highlights some of the fascinating differences between the two modes: Not everyone learns to write, but nearly everyone learns to speak. This book examines these differences and more at great depth." - Steven Darian, STC Fellow About the Author Peter Elbow is Professor of English, Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and former director of its Writing Program