Bad Language: Decoding Donald Trump

· Wayzgoose Press
5,0
1 review
eBook
239
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About this eBook

You’ve heard the speeches. Now see how they work—that is, how language can be used to convey information—or misinformation—to persuade, to rouse, to obfuscate. Linguist and researcher Dr. Andy Curtis deconstructs five major speeches by Donald Trump and examines them move by move, line by line, and explains how they function.

Thoroughly researched (citing well over 200 sources) and engagingly written, this book pulls back the curtain to show you how this kind of speechifying works. Words matter, whether you’re speaking them or hearing them. As a global citizen, you owe it to yourself to understand the deeper meaning of the messages targeted at you. With a better understanding of how language works, you’ll be better equipped to make sense of what you hear, and to distinguish fact from fiction.

Ratings and reviews

5,0
1 review
Ming Ming Chiu
02 February 2025
I admire Andy Curtis’s courage and perseverance. He analyzed 5 of Donald Trump’s speeches in painstaking detail to document each of his strategies for saying false and misleading (F&M) statements. While his introduction and conclusion crisply summarizes each strategy (e.g., F&Ms piled up on top of each other as quickly as possible), his chapters detail their mechanisms with excerpts from Trump’s speeches. Curtis adds interesting, parallel anecdotes from popular films to make it more enjoyable.
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About the author

Dr. Andy Curtis started his professional life working as a clinical biochemist in hospitals in the UK. However, having found his real passions – teaching, learning, languages and cultures – he moved from health care to science education to language education, making his a highly unusual and risky professional pathway. But such a pathway has enabled him to bring together diverse fields of inquiry that have not been previously connected, to create new bodies of knowledge and disciplinary domains. He has been recognized as the founder of the New Peace Linguistics, which focuses on how powerful people use language not to communicate but to manipulate.

After completing his M.A. in Applied Linguistics and Language Education and his Ph.D. in International Education at the University of York in England, Dr. Curtis taught language and logistics courses at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 1995 to 2000. From 2001 to 2007, he was the Executive Director of the School of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and a professor at the School for International Training in Vermont, USA.

From 2007 to 2011, Dr. Curtis served as the Director of the English Language Teaching Unit at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and as a professor in the Faculty of Education there. He has been an online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) professor in the Graduate School of Education of Anaheim University, CA, USA since 2011. From 2015 to 2016, he served as the 50th President of the TESOL International Association. In 2016, he received one of the Association’s 50-at-50 Awards, when members around the world voted him one of the fifty most influential figures in the field, over the first 50 years of the Association.

Over the last 30-plus years, Dr. Curtis has (co)authored and (co)edited 200 articles, book chapters, and books, presented to 50,000 language educators in 100 countries, in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, North, South and Central America, and his writings have been read by 100,000 language educators in 150 countries. Dr. Curtis is currently serving as a Specially Appointed Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Macau, and is cross-appointed to a number of universities in Mainland China.

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