Dennis Baron --
Professor of English and linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
email Dennis Baron
office: 251 English
phone: 217-244-0568
English department: 217-333-2390
fax: 217-333-4321
hours: Mon and Weds. 1 - 2 pm and by appointment
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Research interests:
- Language legislation, policy and reform; minority languages and dialects; linguistic rights
- Reading, writing, and other aspects of literacy
- Technologies of communication
- The present state of the English language, its history and future
- Language and gender
- Writing studies
- Issues in higher education and teaching
Teaching, spring 2007:
Work in progress:From pencils to pixels: Communicating in the digital age --
Tracing the impact of technologies of communication on our reading and writing practices, and how the needs of readers and writers shape technological development, from the invention of writing to the digital age.
Books:
The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans?
(Yale Univ. Press, 1990)Grammar and Gender (Yale Univ. Press, 1986)
Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language
(Yale Univ. Press, 1982)Guide to Home Language Repair
(Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994)Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary
(Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1988)
Consulting:
Experienced academic program reviewer -- click to read my essay on program reviews in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Peer Review
Consultant on the state of the English language for radio, television, and the press.
Expert reports and testimony on --
- readability and legibility
- literacy
- plagiarism
- language rights and linguistic discrimination
- interpretation of words and documents
- meanings and trademarks
Essays:
Read these and other essays on language and education:
Guns and Grammar: The linguistics of the Second Amendment
Official English from the school house to the White House
English, the official national language
José Can You See?: The controversy over translating the Star-Spangled Banner into English
No Students Left Behind: Literacy measures and the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education
The president's reading lesson: George Bush and "The Pet Goat" on 9/11
English Spoken Here: What the 2000 Census tells us about language
A modest proposal: Don't make English official, ban it instead
Doublespeak is alive!: Latest winners of the annual awards
Spanish abuse: judge censures mother for speaking Spanish to her child
Words and war: our increasingly lethal vocabulary
Computers grade essays: write for your audience, but what if your audience is a machine?
Words that failed: 150 years of gender-neutral English pronouns
From pencils to pixels: the earliest and latest in writing technology
Technologies of the word: the newest genres of communication
The legendary English-only vote of 1795 (or was it 1776?): it never happend, folks
The young professors: how television views the academy
The SAT writing test: why it's won't tell us what we need to know
. . . . and many more
When People Roamed the Earth --
a book for children
find out what would happen if dinosaurs were alive today and people lived long ago.
Cartoons --
click for a portfolio of the artist