Other floors, other voices

the long version

John Swales' textography might also be called "comparative rhetoric in a small building," offering proof, once again, that another culture may be only a trip up or down a flight of stairs. On its three floors, Swales finds modes of text-building as distinctive and exotic as field-workers find in remote valleys and isolated islands: one floor languaging about frozen Unix stations; the next creating, partly in Latin, the Flora Novo-Galiciana; and the third offering a range of genres that attempt to variously negotiate the "theory-practice" requirements of English as a second language. Each community is closely observed and described in almost sensuous detail, so that we not only gain real insight into the way the writing is done on the three floors, but also feel the adventure of it and, best of all, learn to hear the individual voices in each community.