Richard Lanham is a maverick rhetorician and author of Style: An Anti-Textbook , a book whose wisdom I find myself coming back to again and again. Lanham concludes that a contemporary understanding of rhetoric best describes it as the "science of human attention-structures." Rhetoric is about the best ways of getting and holding attention with language, and shaping that attention to achieve particular outcomes.

It is odd, but, after reading this quote, oddly appropriate that an English professor who made his name with A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms finished his career with a book on The Economics of Attention. Are content creators the most effective rhetoricians? Can books compete with screens? How does language exist among the visual? What should the task of the critic or the book reviewer be in this environment? Should it attempt to address the same market as digital content, or should it offer something else? How about fiction? And writing in general?

As I see it, writing should do what digital distraction cannot. The sentence can be a lonely place, yes, but a lonely place is better than an anonymous, frictionless non-place.