Landmark Essays on Speech and Writing

Classical rhetoric was originally all about speech; then 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 finally people are looking again at speech and how it relates to writing.

At this moment, then, when we are inheritors of research showing that writing can be thought of as different and yet not different from speech. In this volume, leading speech and writing expert, Peter Elbow, gathers a selection of classic essays that show the main streams of thinking that have gone on 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.

Cheryl Glenn is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University

Andrea A. Lunsford is Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University