I was feeling like a proud papa the day I shared a copy of my new textbook with a colleague. For more than two years, supported by project editors, graphic designers, marketers, and copy editors, I'd fussed over every word in that book. By now, it had to be perfect.

Beaming immodestly, I watched as my friend skimmed the table of contents, riffled through the pages, glanced at the front and back covers--and then frowned.

"College," he said, handing the book back to me. "Back cover. College is misspelled."

And so it was. In small print at the end of a blurb right smack in the middle of the back cover, the word college was spelled with just one l.

It was a long time before I could focus on anything contained in the 457 pages of that textbook. Every time I picked it up all I could see was the word colege on the back cover. It may have been printed in 10-point type, but to me the misspelled word stood a mile high in clownish neon.

Of course, I eventually got over my anger, frustration, and embarrassment--about six months later when the typo was corrected in the second printing. But along the way I'd learned a valuable lesson about proofreading: no matter how thoroughly we examine a text, there's always one more little blunder waiting to be discovered.

In other words, there's no foolproof formula for perfect proofreading every time. It's just too tempting to see what we intended to write rather than the words that actually appear on the page or screen. Still, the goal of perfection is worth pursuing, and in that spirit I offer these Ten Proofreading Tips to help you see (or hear) your errors before anybody else does.

And if you have any proofreading advice that you'd like to pass along, please click on the comments button below.

More About Proofreading:

• Top Ten Proofreading Tips
• Proofreading for Errors in Verb Tense
• Proofreading Practice: Commonly Confused Words
• Proofreading for Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement

Image: Passages: A Writer's Guide, 3rd edition, by Richard Nordquist (St. Martin's Press, 1995)

Blackboards began disappearing from American classrooms in the 1960s. They were replaced, at first, by greenboards (still chalky), then by whiteboards (dry erase), and finally by interactive whiteboards, connected to computers and projectors.

Here at About Grammar & Composition, we're on a campaign to bring back the blackboard (in miniature) as a simple visual aid. Here are some examples from our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms.

• Comma

  

  The caption: Commas save lives.



• Digraph

  

  A digraph, as you may have gathered from this example, is two successive letters representing a single sound.



• Irony Deficiency

  

  This observation from Roy Blount, Jr., appears in our discussion of irony deficiency: the inability to recognize, comprehend, and/or utilize irony.



• Bathos

  

  Bathos (an abrupt and often ludicrous transition in style from the elevated to the ordinary) is illustrated by these lines from a blessedly anonymous 19th-century poet:

  O Moon, when I gaze on thy beautiful face,
  Careering along through the boundaries of space,
  The thought has often come into my mind
  If I shall ever see thy glorious behind.

  The poem appears in The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.



• Silent Letter

  

  The initial letter in each of these words is a silent letter.



• Tautophony

  

  A cacophonous example of tautophony: excessive repetition of the same vowel or consonant sound.



• Dehortatio

  

  This bit of wisdom illustrates the rhetorical device of dehortatio: dissuasive advice given with authority.

For more blackboards (as well as definitions, examples, and discussions), visit the more than 1,300 entries in our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms.

More Blackboards:

• Anagrams
• Attributive Adjectives
• Fused Sentence
• Heteronyms
• Kangaroo Words
• Kennings
• Phonemes
• Semantic Bleaching
• Strike-through
• Tongue Twisters
• Transferred Epithet
• Tricolon

It's time for our monthly round-up of language-related items in the news--from the linguistically profound to the lexically ridiculous.

• Regards to "Dear"
  It's time we ditched "Dear . . . " from work e-mails, according to a US political figure, who says it's too intimate. So what is the most appropriate way to greet someone in an e-mail--hi, hey or just get straight to the point? . . . Read more
  (James Morgan, "Should E-mails Open With Dear, Hi, or Hey?" BBC News Magazine [UK], January 21, 2011)


• Twitter Dialects
  The words you write on Twitter can tell people more than just the status of your relationship or how you like the latest Bon Jovi CD. It may just indicate not only how you're living, but where you're living in the U.S. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined 380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010 and found that the social networking site is full of its own kinds of geographical dialects. . . . Read more
  (Jennifer C. Yates, "Twitter Is Full of Regional 'Accents,' Study Finds." USA Today, January 11, 2011)


• Robo-Readers on Wall Street
  The number-crunchers on Wall Street are using new linguistics-based software to quantify and qualify investor sentiment. . . . The development goes far beyond standard digital fare like most-read and e-mailed lists. In some cases, the computers are actually parsing writers' words, sentence structure, even the odd emoticon. . . . The programs are written to recognize the meaning of words and phrases in context, like distinguishing between "terribly," "good" and "terribly good." . . . Read more
  (Graham Bowley, "Computers That Trade on the News." The New York Times, December 22, 2010)


• Shakespeare in 38 Languages
  Anyone who struggles with Shakespeare in English will next year be able to see if it is any easier in Lithuanian. Or Portuguese, Italian or Spanish, perhaps. And if all that fails--Troilus and Cressida in Maori? In fact, there will be 38 different ways to experience it, as Shakespeare's Globe presents all of the Bard's plays, each in a different language, as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. . . . Read more
  (Mark Brown, "Speak the Speech . . . Shakespeare's Plays to Be Performed in 38 Languages." The Guardian [UK], January 20, 2011)


• The Grammar Conspiracy
  Even before the Tucson shootings, Jared L. Loughner acted weirdly and darkly in so many ways that singling out any one aspect may defy sense. Nonetheless, for bizarreness, his rants about grammar stand out. As Mr. Loughner has tried to explain it in Web postings, English grammar is not merely usage that enjoys common acceptance. Rather, it is nothing less than a government conspiracy to control people's minds. . . . Read more
  (Clyde Haberman, "Subjects and Verbs as Evil Plot." The New York Times, January 13, 2011)


• The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year
  In its 21st annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted "app" (noun, an abbreviated form of application, a software program for a computer or phone operating system) as the word of the year for 2010. . . . Read more
  ("App Voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society." American Dialect Society press release, January 8, 2011)


• Rules for Aspiring Hacks
  I wrote these 25 commandments as a panic response 15 or more years ago to an invitation to do some media training for a group of Elsevier editors. I began compiling them because I had just asked myself what was the most important thing to remember about writing a story, and the answer came back loud and clear: "To make somebody read it." Ultimately, there's no other reason for writing. . . . Read more
  (Tim Radford, "A Manifesto for the Simple Scribe--My 25 Commandments for Journalists." The Guardian Language Blog [UK], January 19, 2011)


• Huck Finn Loses the "N" Word
  [Mark] Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave." . . . Read more
  (Marc Schultz, "Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word." Publishers Weekly, January 3, 2011)


• Auto-incorrection
  Welcome to the world of smartphone autocorrection, where incautious typing can lead to hilarious and sometimes shocking results. . . . Just as the spell-check feature in a word-processing program tries to save you from your own sloppy typing, either by politely suggesting alternatives or by automatically replacing egregious errors, the latest mobile devices are supposed to take care of your typos--but often fail with comic results. . . . Read more
  (Ben Zimmer, "On Language: Auto(in)correct." The New York Times Magazine. January 16, 2011)

Back Issues of Language in the News:

• Language in the News: The Top Ten Stories of 2010
• Robots, But-Heads, and Plagiarism (November 2010)
• Slang, Semantics, and Swearing (October 2010)

Today's guest blogger is Dr. Elizabeth Howells, director of composition at Armstrong Atlantic State University and the author of a superb new textbook, Literature: Reading to Write (Longman, 2011). In this article, she draws on the traditional canons of rhetoric to illustrate her point that the processes of reading and writing are inextricably intertwined.

The Reading/Writing Dialectic

While it may be a cop out for a writing teacher to pass the buck to a book, the truth is that reading teaches writing better than anything else can. Reading, in fact, may be the only way to improve writing. From a rhetorical standpoint, in considering Aristotle's canons of rhetoric, certainly, reading the writing of others helps with invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

• Invention
  One of my favorite irreverent writing mentors is Anne Lamott and in her standby Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, she recommends "calling around" as a fantastic tool for procrastination, an opportunity to overcome writer's block, and a strategy for becoming a better writer. Here is what she says:

  The truth is that there are simply going to be times when you can't go forward in your work until you find out something about the place you grew up, when it was still a railroad town, or what the early stages of shingles are like, or what your character would actually experience the first week of beauty school. . . . And it may also turn out that in searching for this one bit of information, something else will turn up that you absolutely could not have known would be out there waiting for you.

  While Lamott's advice is to "call around," I think reading serves the same purpose. Through reading, ideas are illuminated, details are fine tuned, and topics are discovered. The writer learns what stories need telling and where innovations are to be found. While for some writing tasks, like research papers, the research is required, for most writing tasks, it is recommended.



• Arrangement
  Let's say that you do have a topic you want to write on. If we consider that Aristotelian triad, you/the rhetor with said topic will want to identify the audience. Is it personal or professional? Academic or extra-curricular? Experts in a field or novices to the subject?
  
  In reading works on similar topics, you get a sense of the current conversation in this field and a sense of what has been said before and how it has been said. Whether it means reading other memoirs on motherhood or researching articles on the industrial revolution in England at the library, your first goal should be to identify the discourse community of which you want to become a part.


• Style
  Roman writing instruction still applies today. When learning to write, students benefit from learning the rules, imitating models, then practicing through exercises. One of the best ways to learn style is through imitating closely the long complex sentences of Faulkner as well as the short compact journalistic lines of Hemingway. In imitating syntax and diction, students of writing learn to read closely and write carefully with an intense and increased awareness of writerly strategy and choice.


• Memory
  Every semester, students ask how to improve their vocabulary, and still occasionally but less and less often, they ask how to become better spellers. For either of those concerns, reading is the answer. Children, of course, exponentially increase their vocabularies through reading and being read to, but old dogs can still learn new words. The old-fashioned work of looking up and writing down new words is the only way to improve a working vocabulary.


• Delivery
  In the preface of my textbook Literature: Reading to Write, I quote from Emerson's "The American Scholar" to point to the value of engaged active reading.

  'Tis the good reader that makes the good book. . . . One must be an inventor to read well. . . . There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

  And here is where the dialectic takes shape. If we read creatively, our reading becomes "luminous with manifold allusion" and so does our writing. We recognize the resonance of the words we choose, hear the echoes of ideas, and revere their sacred dynamism, and we as authors, rhetors, and writers can become as "broad as the world."

For more information about Dr. Howells' textbook Literature: Reading to Write, go to the website of Pearson Higher Education. There you will find a detailed table of contents and downloadable instructor resources.

Image: Literature: Reading to Write, by Elizabeth Howells (Longman, 2011)

"When I say writing," observed novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, "O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind."

In school, the injunction to "write it over again" is often delivered (or at least perceived) as a punishment or dull chore. But as the professionals remind us (see Writers on Rewriting), revising is an essential part of composing. And in the end it truly can be the most satisfying part. As Tolstoy said, "I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again."

Unfortunately, most of us don't have time for the "over and over again" part. So when you have to make do with a hasty revision, consider applying the strategies in these three checklists.

• Revision Checklist: Guidelines for Revising a Composition
  This ten-point list should serve as a handy guide when it comes time to revise an essay or report.


• Checklist for Editing Paragraphs and Essays
  After revising an essay until we're satisfied with its basic content and structure, we still need to edit our work to make sure that each sentence is clear, concise, forceful, and correct.


• Top Ten Proofreading Tips
  No matter how carefully we examine a text, it seems there's always one more little mistake waiting to be discovered. These proofreading tips should help you catch those errors before anybody else does.

If your knowledge of Australian English begins and ends with "toss another shrimp on the barbie," here's a chance to expand your vocabulary.

The editors (and marketing staff) of Macquarie Dictionary, "the standard reference on Australian English," have invited readers to select the country's word or phrase of the year. To enlighten, delight, and distract you, wherever you may live, here are ten ace contenders from the list of 108 nominees.

• binge listening noun
  1. periodic exposure to damagingly high levels of sound as part of a leisure activity, as when listening to loud music for many hours at a party, nightclub, rock concert, etc., or listening to music on headphones at a loud volume.
  2. the practice of listening to a favorite piece of music or music performer to the exclusion of all else over a period of time until one's enthusiasm wanes.


• buddymoon noun
  A honeymoon in which friends are invited to accompany the newly-wed couple.


• bunta adjective (colloquial)
  Out of control, as a result of experiencing strong emotion as joy, anger, etc.: to go bunta when the team wins; to go bunta and burn the house down.


• charismatic megafauna noun
  Large animals which have an appeal for the general public, as whales, pandas, gorillas, etc.


• ego-surf verb
  To search the internet for instances of one's own name, as in mentions in text, links to one's blog, etc.


• googleganger noun
  A person with the same name as oneself, whose online references are mixed with one's own among search results for one's name.


• preload verb (colloquial)
  To consume alcoholic drinks at one's home in advance of going to a social event where such drinks would be more expensive.


• prole drift noun
  The tendency of a low socio-economic group to adopt particular up-market products and styles, thus eroding the market status of these commodities.


• street journalism noun
  The live reporting of incidents or events by individuals who are not professionals but who provide on-the-spot accounts to a wide online audience by immediately accessing the internet, usually with a mobile phone.


• wet signature noun
  A handwritten signature on paper (opposed to a digital signature). [See retronym.]

Voting closes on January 28, and the People's Choice Award for Word of the Year will be announced early next month. Till then, g'day See ya later!

More Words About Words:

• Five Words That May Not Mean What You Think They Mean
• Where Does Language Come From?
• Neil Postman's Exercise in Etymology

He was an impossible man to work for--rude, ungracious and perpetually dissatisfied with what he read, and I admire him more than anyone I have met in professional life. Only perfection was good enough for him, and on the rare occasions he encountered it, he viewed it with astonished suspicion.

The "impossible man" described here by publisher Ralph Ingersoll was the legendary Harold Ross--founder and, for 26 years, the editor of The New Yorker magazine. James Thurber called him "the most remarkable man I have ever known and the greatest editor."

Obsessive in his attention to factual and grammatical detail, Ross insisted that above all else the language in his weekly magazine must be clear and concise. As a result, he frequently squabbled with his gang of writers, which included such talents as S.J. Perelman, Lillian Ross, E.B. White, John Hersey, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. "Editing," Ross once said, "is the same as quarreling with writers--same thing exactly."

Journalist Alistair Cooke, himself a fastidious stylist, observed that Ross's "probing, unsleeping, fussy, appallingly unforgiving intelligence" was often revealed in the notes he attached to page proofs:

They could run to ten or fifteen comments, varying from an abrupt single word ("Bushwah!") to a brief note of advice ("Could trim here" and "too detailed") to exasperated comments on the writer's dumbness ("Outside of what? And sheriff who? Who's he?") or verbosity ("For God's sake, there's no point in enumerating all these subsidiaries.") . . .

Such was Ross's writhing perfectionism that none of the permanent staff could remember a time when he ever wrote the comment "good" or "what we want." The best he was ever known to concede was "in the direction of what we want."
(Alistair Cooke, Memories of the Great and the Good. Arcade Publishing, 1999)

"We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here," Ross once said, "probably to a point approaching the ultimate."

To learn more about this impossible, remarkable man, visit Harold Ross on Editing.

More About Editors and Editing:

• James Thurber on Writing and Editing
• An Editor's Five Rules of Thumb
• Max Perkins' Advice to a Young Writer

Image: Letters From the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross, edited by Thomas Kunkel (Modern Library, 2000)

Enjoy two lessons in one today: our quarterly quiz on commonly confused words packed in proverbial wisdom. As a bonus, if you can answer all 20 questions correctly, you'll be eligible to take The Big Quiz on Commonly Confused Words.

You have three minutes, starting now.

1. Affects or Effects
   Bitter pills may have wholesome _____.


2. Carat, Caret, or Carrot
   Never bolt your door with a boiled _____.


3. Coarse or Course
   The _____ of true love never did run smooth.


4. Council or Counsel
   A fool may give a wise man _____.


5. Desert or Dessert
   Rats _____ a sinking ship.


6. Faint or Feint
   _____ heart never won fair lady.


7. Fair or Fare
   All's _____ in love and war.


8. Flaunting or Flouting
   One courts misfortune by _____ wealth.


9. Higher or Hire
   The _____ a monkey climbs, the more he shows his rump.


10. Loose or Lose
    You snooze, you _____.


11. Palates, Palettes, or Pallets
    No dish pleases all _____ alike.


12. Pores or Pours
    It never rains but it _____.


13. Precedes or Proceeds
    Bad news _____ by wings; good news hardly walks.


14. Quell or Quench
    Wine in the bottle does not _____ thirst.


15. Rains, Reigns, or Reins
    If passion drives, let reason hold the _____.


16. Shear or Sheer
    It is _____ folly to expect justice from the unprincipled.


17. Tide or Tied
    Time and _____ wait for no man.


18. Wade or Weighed
    Words must be _____, not counted.


19. Ware, Wear, or Where
    If the shoe fits, _____ it.


20. Who's or Whose
    Never slap a man _____ chewing tobacco.

Answers:

1. effects
2. carrot
3. course
4. counsel
5. desert
6. Faint
7. fair
8. flaunting
9. higher
10. lose
11. palates
12. pours
13. proceeds
14. quench
15. reins
16. sheer
17. tide
18. weighed
19. wear
20. who's

More Quizzes:

• Quiz on Commonly Confused Words (Autumn 2010)
• The Big Quiz on Commonly Confused Words
• The Big Quiz on Figures of Speech in Advertising Slogans

Image: a Spanish proverb

"In my life I have met five great presidents but only one great English teacher." That was John Steinbeck's explanation for why he declined an invitation to the White House so that he could attend a dinner honoring his high school English teacher.

Most of us, I'm guessing, can recall at least one great English teacher--someone who challenged us, motivated us, and deepened our appreciation and understanding of language and literature.

While thinking about the most influential English teacher in your life, consider the recollections of these eight modern authors.

• Nikki Giovanni (poet and distinguished professor of English at Virginia Tech) on Miss Delaney
  The reason Miss Delaney was my favorite teacher, not just my favorite English teacher, is that she would let me read any book I wanted and would allow me to report on it.
  (Nikki Giovanni, "In Praise of a Teacher," in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems. William Morrow, 2002)


• Jesse Stuart (novelist, essayist, and short-story writer) on Mrs. R. E. Hatton
  In high school we had to write and read aloud a theme a week. I had a wonderful English teacher, Mrs. R. E. Hatton, trained in the University of Missouri College of Journalism. She told us to write our themes on subjects we knew the most about. She became one of my favorite teachers of a lifetime. . . .
  
  Two of the themes I wrote for Mrs. Hatton have been published. "Nest Egg" was published in the Atlantic Monthly and has been reprinted in college and high school textbooks around the world. I wrote it when I was sixteen years old.
  (Jesse Stuart, My World. University Press of Kentucky, 1975)


• J. K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books) on Miss Shepherd
  I quite liked secondary school, but I was particularly influenced by my English teacher, Miss [Lucy] Shepherd. She was strict, and could be quite caustic, but she was very conscientious. I really respected her because she was a teacher who was passionate about teaching us. She was an introduction to a different kind of woman, I suppose. She was a feminist, and clever. She had this incredibly no-nonsense approach. . . . Miss Shepherd was very hot on structure and refused to allow us to be the least bit sloppy. Even though I read a great deal, it was very good to be shown exactly what gave writing structure and pace. I learned such a lot from her and we're still in touch. She was the only teacher I ever confided in. She inspired trust.
  (Quoted by Lindsey Fraser in Conversations with J. K. Rowling. Scholastic Books, 2001)


• Willie Morris (author and editor) on Mrs. Omie Parker
  I had a great high school English teacher, Mrs. Omie Parker. . . . She was a marvelous high school English teacher, and a genuine taskmaster who opened up to me the whole world of language and its possibilities. She got us reading good books, literature, and poetry.
  (Willie Morris in an interview with John Griffin Jones, from Mississippi Writers Talking II. University Press of Mississippi, 1983)


• Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) on Frank Halford
  He once gave me 10 out of 10 for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can't do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me 10 out of 10, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it.
  (Quoted by Nicholas Wroe, "Planet of the Japes." The Guardian, June 3, 2000)


• bell hooks (author and social activist) on a "white and middle-aged" woman
  My favorite English teacher, white and middle-aged, was seen as a "nigger lover" because she repudiated the racism and white supremacy of the world around us, because she wanted her classroom to be a place where black students could learn with as much passion and zeal as white students. . . . I remember her warmth, her daring, her will to challenge. I remember that she cared for black students, affirming our wholeness and the rightness of our being. And most importantly, she did not shame us.
  (bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. Routledge, 2009)


• Samuel R. Delany (novelist and professor of English at Temple University) on Mrs. T
  In English that term we had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a good handful of traditional myths--most of which I was familiar with from My Book/House. We even tackled one or two Greek plays in translation; and over one English period, Mrs. T, my favorite English teacher from my whole elementary school days, explained to us the etymology of "calligraphy," "geology," "optical," "palindrome," "obscene," and "poet."
  (Samuel R. Delany, "Shadows," in Longer Views: Extended Essays. Wesleyan University Press, 1996)


• Philip Levine (distinguished poet in residence at New York University) on Mrs. Paperno
  [O]n a late morning I shall never forget, my wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Paperno--a saucy little woman with a will of steel and an enormous heart--read to the class the poem "Arms and the Boy," by Wilfred Owen. This was 1945, the war was still raging in Europe and Asia and on the Pacific Islands, and I was approaching draft age. . . .
  
  That day, Mrs. Paperno must have sensed how deeply I was affected by Owen's poem, for after class she offered to lend me the book--if I read it with white gloves on. I took her up on her offer and discovered that the fears I had of dying for some abstract cause--like democracy or patriotism or an end to the wars to come--and the horror I felt at the thought of killing for any reason, I shared with this young Englishman.
  (Philip Levine in First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them, edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Scribner, 2000)

Now it's your turn to tell us about one great English teacher from your days in school or college. Not necessarily the most learned scholar or the most lovable character, but the one teacher who has had an enduring influence on the way you think, work, read, or write. To share your recollections, click on the comments button below.

On Learning to Write

• Can Writing Be Taught?
• When and How Did You Learn to Write?
• Does Anyone Remember Miss Groby?

Today as we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., a familiar anaphora will ring out time and again: "I have a dream." And in some ways, that's unfortunate.

The phrase is powerful and historically significant--no doubt about that. Yet its power and significance have been worn thin in recent years through repeated use as a civil rights sound bite and a journalistic cliché.

The impassioned speech that Dr. King delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 is one of the great orations of the past century. In addition to serving as a central text of the Civil Rights Movement, the "I Have a Dream" speech is a model of effective communication. In fact, it's one of the most commonly anthologized works in composition textbooks.

The final section of the speech, in which Dr. King articulates his dream of freedom and equality, is familiar to most Americans. (According to one study, 97 percent of American teenagers recognize the source of the refrain "I have a dream.") But the rest of the speech--an African-American jeremiad--deserves just as much attention for its social significance and rhetorical power: the opening allusions to Lincoln and to slavery, the telling analogy of a bad check, the conventional metaphors, the distinctive messages delivered to different segments of the audience, and the insistent call for action now:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

Clearly, without this demand for present action, the more famous "I have a dream" refrain would be little more than dreaminess.

So why not set aside a few minutes to read the complete "I Have a Dream" speech. Then test your familiarity with Dr. King's words by taking this brief reading quiz.

Classic American Speeches:

• "I Have a Dream," by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln
• The Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy

Image: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)