Slowing Language Down: At Strategy for Systematically Getting at the Issues

The poet Wendell Berry (1980–1981) says that one of the functions of poetry is to “slow language down” and adds that this “slowing” process helps to protect us against glibness. Poetry, however, is not alone in performing this service: Any form of discourse that forces an uncommon degree of scrupulousness on the speaker will do the same thing.