Landmark Essays on Speech and Writing

About the Book: 

Aside from the obvious dissimilarities, to what extent is writing distinct from speech? This book is testament to how focus in rhetoric studies has moved onto speech and how it relates to writing. From the development of alphabetic literacy to intonation and its effect on writing, these essays reflect our changing understanding of the interrelation of speech and writing. A welcome bonus is an appendix that illustrates how writers have tried to create the illusion of speech in their texts: from Robert Burn’s 1788 poem “To A Mouse. On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough” to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, these extracts show exactly how, in the words of the book’s publicity, writing “can be thought of as different and yet not different from speech”.

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