There were, of course, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, important sociolinguistic reasons for emphasizing the validity of difference and denying the inherent inferiority of minority dialects. However, this battle has long since been won, following research into West-Indian English in Birmingham by Wight and Sinclair and into Black English in New York by Labov. Now the advances in descriptive linguistics of the last generation should give us the confidence to re-introduce evaluation, to admit what we have always secretly acknowledged, that some texts and some writer are better than other, and to try to account not simply for difference and for how existing texts mean, but also for quality and for why one textualization might mean more or better than another.