Description
About the Author
Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has served as a dean and as interim provost. He is the author of Do You Make These Mistakes in English? (OUP, 2009), Bad Language (OUP, 2005), and The Logic of Markedness (OUP, 1996).
Reviews
Conditional apologies, vague apologies, apologies not accepted: Why is it so hard to say we're sorry and be done with it? With a clear eye and prose that never drags, Ed Battistella brilliantly illuminates the hidden dynamics of public apologies from the Oprah Winfrey Show to Mel Gibson's downfall and from Joe Biden's doubletalk to Woodrow Wilson's shoelace-chewing mea culpa. You won't be sorry you read this book. * David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published *
Sorry About That is a bracing catalogue of human folly that stuck with me after I'd finished reading it. Battistella provides a panoramic view of shameful episodes and the subsequent apologies, confessions, and denials whose language he keenly dissects, in order to show all the ways that we have to genuinely apologize * and to wiggle free. Observers of public language will love the book. (So too, alas, will serial offenders.)Michael Erard, author of Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners *
Edwin Battistella's readable and incisive Sorry About That explains why some apologies succeed, or at least avoid exacerbating the original offense, but most of them fail." * Wall St. Journal *
By examining the grammatical and rhetorical structure of such apologies, Battistella shows that our anxieties and confusions about confession are rooted in a deeper ambiguity that defines the genre of apology more broadly: the tension between the culpable self and the apologetic self. * Christian Century *
the book is wonderful reading * Haoran Mao, Discourse Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190468903
Author Edwin L. Battistella
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 18mm