Abstract
The text of my sermon for today is drawn from a cartoon which appeared in the Publishers Newspaper Syndicate Sunday comics Grin and Bear It on February 2 of this year. The cartoon depicts an archeologist studying a stone covered with pictographs. Behind him are a fellow archeologist (both have bushy white mustaches, pith helmets, khaki shorts) and an Arab-looking individual. In the far distance one can see sand and a truck labeled Archeological Expedition, so that there can be no misunderstanding. The archeologist who is examining the stone remarks: If you ask me, it's overwritten! . . . Always using a paragraph where a simple sentence would do! Whether or not that is sound archeology, the speaker is exactly in the position of a teacher of English as a second language (or for that matter any teacher of any second language). He has done exactly what many of us do as we look at an advanced-level foreign-student composition; that is, he has judged the construction of the composition by the standards of the rhetoric which he takes for granted. But let me retrogress for a moment.
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