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Summary

I analyze how people write and revise local language policies, through text histories of four policies in Frederick County, Anne Arundel County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County in the state of Maryland. Three of the four policies follow the same general template, and that template emerged out of an even earlier partnership between the organization ProEnglish and the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. This state of affairs complicates previous accounts of local language policies, which tend to treat the phenomenon as either a purely grassroots phenomenon or as a case of astroturfing. Instead, all language policymakers have agency and are strategic about their writing processes. I argue that three writing strategies are particularly important: ghostwriting, making conscious choices about genre, and working with templates. While language policies are sometimes treated as transparent windows into language ideology, the reality is more complex because there are so many other procedural and interpersonal factors involved.

Summary

Prose literature, as opposed to mere writing, may be said to have begun when men began to exploit the fact that their views on important matters could be disseminated by means of the liber or uolumen which could be multiplied. The intended readers of the kind of technical works reviewed in this chapter were influential Romans professionally interested in the subjects treated. The chapter discusses some kinds of writing which are best described as political manifestos or memoirs. In the Greek world it had long been the custom of authors to address poems, histories, and technical works to a patron or friend, so that the work might take on the appearance of a private letter of didactic character. By using Latin in his own pithy way, M. Porcius Cato the Elder was asserting the new importance of the language in international diplomacy, and implicitly rejecting the attitude and the Greek rhetoric of a T. Quinctius Flamininus.

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2 - Creating English-Only Policies

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6 - Prose literature

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2 results

2 - Creating English-Only Policies

Summary

6 - Prose literature

Summary