Essays on language, reading, writing, and technology . . .

 

Guns and Grammar: The linguistics of the Second Amendment

Official English from the School House to the White House

The President’s reading lesson [George Bush reads "The Pet Goat" along with a class of Florida second-graders on the morning of 9/11]

Farsi farce

English, the official national language

No students Left Behind: Literacy measurement and the Spellings Commission on the future of higher education in Americas

Jose Can You See?: teaching video for the controversy over the Spanish translation of the "Star-Spangled Banner"

Google in China

Word of the Year for 2005

Doublespeak is alive!

SAT Writing Test

The Young Professors

Words and War

Patriot Acts

Almanacs of mass destruction

English spoken here? What the 2000 census tells us about language in the USA

English, Spanish and the new nativism

Help Wanted: Pashto

First, kill all the translators

A panda walks into a bar . . .

Buying literacy: a (ghost)writing lesson

Mad Cow: Word of the year for 2003

Take this McJob and shove it

Is the English language ready for Y2K?

To SIr, or Ma'am, with love (Louisiana law requires students to be polite)

Language legislation and linguistic abuse

Language laws and related court decisions

Reinventing English: Simple language may not always be best

Don’t make English official – Ban it instead

Spanish abuse

The legendary English-only vote of 1795, or was it 1776? English never did beat out German by one vote

Hooked on Ebonics

What writers do

Computers grade essays?

Why do academics continue to insist on ‘proper’ English?

Letter to a high school English teacher

How to write a paper

The epicene pronoun: The word that failed

From pencils to pixels: The new technologies of literacy

The literacy complex: we all agree that literacy is important; we just can't agree on what it is, what it's for, and how to measure it

Technologies of the Word: Reading and writing in the digital age