Roger W. Smith is a freelance writer/blogger and independent scholar based in New York City. He was a former freelance reporter for New York Newsday.

He has written many essays and book reviews, as well reference book entries, on writers such as Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and George Gissing.

He has developed and hosts a web site, rogers-rhetoric.com, focused on principles of rhetoric and composition in which he frequently reviews and comments on writers ranging from past masters to present day journalists from a heuristic point of view, and on fine points of grammar and style including "language policing."