One of the trickiest and most tempting acts of writing is to render a person’s styles of speech. My wife, who grew up in Rhode Island, may have once said to me, “I am going to need a new pattern for a ...

Several years ago, a school district in Oakland, California suggested that African-American children be taught standard English using teaching methods used to teach the English language to non English ...

Paul Malevitz writes from Los Angeles: “For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that ...

In March, at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, one panel presentation was of particular interest: It concerned requirements in first-year college composition classes and ...