If you read great works of English literature—Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde or Shakespeare’s plays or John Donne’s sermons—you’ll be struck by the painful contrast between a markedly superior use of the English language of the past and that which is common today.

Reading the essays of Joseph Addison, you’ll be delighted by the clear, flowing eloquence—the transparent lucidity of gorgeous, simple prose. He’ll make you proud to speak English.

Read Samuel Johnson, and you’ll hear the measures of thought unfolding in balanced sentences in the gentle undulations of the English rhythm, his sentences leading up to a conclusive punch. (This is what Aristotle called the periodic style, sentences that are made up of balancing parts and several interconnected members that lead up to a sense of the whole revealed at the very end. The rhetorician Hugh Blair called this the most musical and dignified manner of style.)

Read Jane Austen’s prose and you’ll be confronted with a style that hides a satirical or gently mocking smile.

Read the oratory of Frederick Douglass and you’ll be met with the red-hot jeremiads and mournful laments of one of the greatest orators in American history.