Drawing from both published literature and the extensive correspondence between Dell Hymes and Kenneth Burke housed at Penn State University, Jordan traces the development of “identification” in both writers. (Jordan ... interviewed Hymes, and Hymes further served as a reader of drafts of the essay). Reviewing major texts of each author and noting their particular application in literacy studies, the essay offers another opportunity to reflect upon “identification,” especially as the “key to understanding the rhetorical basis of the sociolinguistics Hymes was advocating” (265). Jordan notes the various permutations identification experienced in Burke’s work: as “crafty persuasion”; as an “active, social process” in Attitudes Toward History; as an “inevitable—thus beneficial and detrimental—characteristic of language in human relations” in Philosophy of Literary Form (Jordan 266); and as central to human life in Rhetoric and Grammar. Identification’s progression toward “a necessary property of social relations” finds it becoming “as much a process and a structure as a discrete perlocutionary act” (269). The choice of term, then—communication, identification, or persuasion—thus owes to “particular historical and social conditions” that make “one more analytically useful than others” (see Hochmuth in Jordan, n12).