Reviews for Rhetorical grammar

The average rating for Rhetorical grammar based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-31 00:00:00 Elizabeth Johnson One needn't go far into this entry to discover I am not a grammatical wizard. It shames me to confess that I am one of those people who, as a young student, escaped from school without having really learned grammar; and that when I compose I proceed as if I were blind: dependent on my clumsier faculties, stumbling from word to word, sentence to sentence, with no real guide to make my way. A book that offers grammatical instruction, therefore, is one whose lessons I am in desperate need. And it is because of that need I took up Kolln's book Rhetorical Grammar. In a clever moment of thought the reader might speculate that the most insightful review of Kolln might be not what it is that I say, but rather how it is that I say it. A mizspelling hear or an grammatical error there--these will tell the story better than I. But this standard would return too harsh a verdict; and in any case my writing would be the farthest measure of Kolln's book, as if you could estimate the worth of Plato by judging his worst student. But that won't do and neither will I. Let me then submit some comments that are more direct. Kolln's book is a medley of successes and failures but she does get one big thing right: she avoids the extremes of either becoming too sophisticated in the discussion or too simplistic; rather she keeps her instruction understandable and useful. Whereas other presentations of grammar ascend towards impossibly complex rules that are too numerous to remember or descend into the elementary with comments that are fitted only for the abecedarian, Kolln does neither. Her discussion is straightforward and concise; chapter topics cover important material; emphasis within chapters is well distributed; she gives examples often, but they do not distract; she reinforces her lessons with problem sets and discussion questions for readers who learns by doing, but all the while does not degenerate into a textbook-like narrative of dull rehearsals. More than all of these things, for me what was most rewarding was those few occasions when I discovered a topic that I had not appreciated beforehand but realized in hind site was a large source of irritation in my composition. A good portion of the book will cover things already known, but there is strewn throughout little revelations that charmingly repay the reader's time. Against Kolln I would charge that she often enters comments that don't strictly follow from her discussion, and that she often applies a more advanced understanding of what is happening in the sentence then can be gleaned from co-text in the discussion. Though I would prefer the author demand more rather than less of me, the unfortunate consequence of her style is a slow but discernible disconnect between some of her points and my understanding. A second charge against her is that she is always quick to tell you how a sentence should be arrayed, but is sometimes derelict about how a broken sentence can be fixed, which is a necessary element of the lesson. And finally I would add, though it is not an indictable offense, that her comments are mostly of the mundane variety, though many have subtle implications; and the result is that a reader looking for very obscure but interesting lessons in writing, like Orwell gives in his essay on Politics and the English Language, will not find them here.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-28 00:00:00 Edgar Sosa Corona READ FOR ENGL 207 Not bad considering a lot of people find this aspect of English really boring. Course wise, the first half of this was very similar to Linguistics. Parsing sentences, figuring out verb types and sentence structures, etc. The book wasn't very helpful in this regard, though. It gives sentence examples but doesn't show you structurally how to break things down when diagramming a sentence. The second half is more directly helpful, since it talks about techniques to recognize at the sentence level more than at the word level, which helps with analyzing writing, whether your own or someone else's.