Landmark Essays on Speech and Writing

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...