Encourages readers to establish a boundary between an acceptable evolution of language and outright language misuse, predicting the consequences of the overuse of street English in contemporary writing, music, and society.

This book offers an easy-to-follow set of writing principles. For example, use active verbs whenever possible, favour concrete language over vague abstractions, avoid long strings of prepositional phrases, employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence and reduce your dependence on the "waste words": 'it', 'this', 'that' and 'there'. The author also shows these rules in action through examples from...

"Cuando el terremoto azota, hay que ponerse en marcha y darlo todo. Eso significa el vocablo azteca ollin, una palabra sagrada que define el compromiso total, indispensable en tiempos de crisis para individuos y organizaciones por un igual. Las palabras atraen o repelen. Ayudan u obstaculizan. Sinan...y también matan. Las palabras constituyen la mismísima materia de nuestra realidad. Y cuando descubrimos la diferencia entre el lenguaje del progreso...

"In The Centrality of Style, editors Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri argue that style is a central concern of composition studies even as they demonstrate that some of the most compelling work in the area has emerged from the margins of the field. Calling attention to this paradox in his foreword to the collection, Paul Butler observes, "Many of the chapters work within the liminal space in which style serves as both a centralizing and decentralizing...