I have proposed that language-consciousness of several sorts may have discouraged the oral, incorrect modes of Swift, Arbuthnot, Mandeville, and Defoe, but encouraged the gentrified, polite, more written modes of Godwin, Burke, and Burney. I see the New Rhetoric as a force for language change in the eighteenth century because it allied itself with prescriptive grammar and with an emergent print culture, under the banner of “civilization,” to promote just the kind of changes we have been discussing. This hypothesis applies not only to writing but also, less stringently, to speech. That is, it finds confirmation in the new awareness of dialects, in the rage to get rid of provincial speech-patterns, in the sudden new popularity of pronouncing dictionaries and rhetorical grammars in the second half of the century.

Late eighteenth-century rhetoric encouraged both polite usage and the precision and explicitness we associate with writtenness. There are also trends in the evolution of prose that do not fit under the rubrics of politeness and literacy, but do seem related to rhetoric: the move away from loose towards periodic sentences, the move away from over concatenation towards balance and antithesis, and the new relish for what I call “purple” prose.