First published in 1984, in
Rhetoric of Everyday English Texts,
the author uses over 100 short texts from educated writers in all walks of life to demonstrate that when we communicate there is a powerful unspoken linguistic consensus as to what is ‘relevant’ to our purpose in writing a particular text for a particular audience. His aim is to make us aware of how the nature of information offered is compatible with the completeness of very small to very large texts.
This book is devoted to the important pedagogical problem of accounting usefully for the sequence and contextual meanings of sentences within typically short texts. Using the simple framework of the consensus, Dr Jordan vividly explains our thinking behind the rhetoric of selecting, sequencing and communicating the information relevant to our meta-structures in texts. He shows that the process of writing short texts is closely related to that of writing summaries and precis and offers his texts as structural models for practice in writing. This teach-yourself book will be valuable to instructors and teachers in communication studies and journalism.