As part of his introduction to an earlier collection of research reports, George Psathas commented on the widespread impact of Harvey Sacks's unpublished lectures in the following terms:

Several years later, these remarks apply with at least equal (if not greater) force to the contents of the present book. Although most of the studies reported here have been carried out since 1975, when Sacks died in a car accident, many of them take as their starting points themes and issues that were originally explored or suggested in the lectures. Sacks's work can now be seen to have had an even wider instructional impact than was evident at the time when Psathas was writing his introduction to Everyday Language More than half the contributors to the present book learned about and became committed to conversation analysis at a distance of six thousand miles from the University of California campuses where Sacks and his colleagues were based.