His essays about modern Chinese language and the understanding of rhetoric, and his sketch of the evolution of Chinese rhetoric history are among the earliest works on rhetoric in the 20~ th century.

This article, against the knowledge background of four comprehensive survey works, Jiang(1985), Zhou(1998), Liao(1999),Liu(2001), and based on an amount of literature review; induces three themes of the cotemporary studies on rhetoric of "Ma s Theory of Word", including all kinds of achievements in the field of micro-rhetoric, theoretical rhetoric and applied rhetoric.