Chair
Tom Pace, John Carroll
University
874 Lafayette Ave. #1
Cincinnati, OH 45220
(513) 281-0401
“A
Return to Style: Style as the Centerpiece of Freshman Composition” – Martha
Wall, BYU.
The purpose of this paper is to criticize the lack
of attention to style in contemporary writing instruction and to propose
pedagogical methods for teaching style in freshman composition. Other
than a brief admonishment to "pay attention to style," discussions of
stylistic strategies are conspicuously absent in both textbook and classroom
conversations about writing. Because much of the problem centers on an overall
uncertainty about the appropriate role for style, this paper explores some of
the current controversies which frustrate its integration into our teaching
practices. The relationship of style to issues such as voice and grammar
are discussed, as well as the role of style in a process-centered classroom.
In addition, the paper addresses the fundamental question: Is
style, in fact, a teachable art?
Based on the assumptions of E. Corbett, R. Hart, M.
Kolln, and J. Williams that style is the most imitable of the skills that
produce effective discourse, this paper seeks to reconceive freshman
composition with style at the center. By incorporating both classical and
contemporary views about style, students learn to assess the rhetorical
situation through the lens of style.
Ultimately, this paper suggests that by placing
style as the centerpiece of freshman writing courses, we can do a better
job of (1) providing a unified context for the study of composition;
(2) teaching students practical writing skills through the study of
language patterns and choices, and their rhetorical effects; (3) informing
students how style matters in the assessment of their writing; and (4) perhaps
most importantly, we can make progress toward restoring the nomenclature of style
to classroom conversation.
“The
‘Weird Al’ Style Method: Playful Imitation as Serious Pedagogy” – Keith Rhodes,
Missouri Western State College. rhodes@mwsc.edu
We
know one large thing about teaching writing: teaching formal grammar does not
work. This was a good thing to learn, but it does not tell us what else to do
with student writers. Particularly as the promise of "process" has
faded into "post-process," a void has grown at the center of composition,
a void filled with teacher's other agendas-from literature to
cultural
studies to abolishing composition altogether.
But
we know one small thing, too. Sentence combining produces strong, if temporary,
gains in style and over-all writing quality. If we hypothesize further from
that result, we should see possibilities for more thorough kinds of
"hands-on" work with style.
I
will argue that playful imitation offers unusual promise for increasing
sentence style while improving over-all writing ability. I will draw loosely
from studies of development and neurology and more strongly from several
strains of composition scholarship, ranging from Ann Berthoff to William
Strong. I will also present methods, examples, and results from attempts by a
colleague and me to build an entire writing pedagogy out of playful work with
imitation, basically Berthoff's idea of "persona paraphrase" as
cross-bred with the songwriting of Weird Al Yankovich.
“Clarifying
Vision: Using Style in the ESL
Classroom” – Clay Bond, Indiana University.
Clarifying
Vision: Using Style in the ESL Classroom
Perhaps the most important difference between ESL
writing instructors and their FYC counterparts is that ESL instructors must
wear two hats: that of the language teacher, and that
of
the writing teacher. Coupled with the tendency of many ESL students to focus
solely on grammar and form, this places the ESL writing instructor in a
difficult position, and is
one
reason ESL writing instructors tend to focus more on form than their FYC
counterparts (Zamel, 1996). It is also possibly one reason that style has been
largely ignored in the ESL research on writing pedagogy.
Style is the area where form and function meet. As
such, it can be an extremely useful tool to show ESL students how different
structures may be used to achieve different goals under different
circumstances, and place grammatical forms and structures in a functional
context. In this paper I will demonstrate that style, far from being irrelevant
or less than useful to ESL writing pedagogy, can be a powerful vector for ESL
students' learning to become more effective writers.
“Prescripts
and Postscripts: Doing it With Style” – Ellen Schendel and Ron Dwelle.
What if style isn’t merely one element of many in a
writing classroom? What if style is itself an object of study for an entire
writing course? During 1999 and 2000, the writing faculty within the Department
of English at Grand Valley State University developed a curriculum for a new
independent Department of Writing at the University. Fall of 2001, the new
department began its existence, teaching undergraduate courses in academic,
creative, and professional writing, offering the BA degree in both creative and
professional writing. All students seeking a major in writing are required to
take a new course, which we developed specifically for the curriculum, called
“Writing With Style.” It is conceived as a beginning (or “foundational”)
course, sophomore-level, parallel with “Introduction to Creative Writing” and
“Introduction to Professional Writing,” both of which are also foundational
requirements.
The nine faculty members in the new department spent
considerable time envisioning the course—debating its theoretical
underpinnings, its function within a student’s overall course of study, the
specifics of its content, and a successful pedagogy for it.
We were the first two faculty members to teach the course
(Fall 2001 and Winter 2002). We deliberately took different approaches to the
course, experimenting with differing content and basing the course on slightly
different theoretical ideologies.
Our proposal for the M/MLA November session is to
lay out the background for the course (both theoretical and practical) and
explain how our differing conceptions of style and its place within a writing
major contributed to our different approaches to teaching Writing with Style.
Chair: Tom Pace
Topic: The Teaching of Style in the Writing Classroom: Problems, Pedagogies, and Possibilities.
Presenter #1
William
Carpenter
Title: “Redefining Style for Composition: A
Systemic Approach”
In this presentation, I redefine style in
composition, (re)positioning it at the intersection of a writer's cognitive,
rhetorical, and linguistic activities, and making it a cornerstone of critical
pedagogy. I propose a model of style grounded in M.A.K. Halliday's theory
of systemic linguistics, which explains language use in terms of its social,
rhetorical, and generic functions. Systemic linguistics provides what
style has lacked in recent composition theory and practice: a theory that
unites global and local composing decisions under a consistent assumption that
language use depends on a writer's understanding of her perceptions,
intentions, and linguistic constructions. The process movement in composition
studies separated style from invention, eventually favoring the latter over the
former in its pedagogy. This separation diminishes style's importance
within the writing process, suggesting it as a concern best handled during the
later revision stages. Such positioning inhibits us from seeing style as
the point of interaction among a writer's cognitive decisions, rhetorical
sensitivities, and grammatical/textual formulations. In this alternate
view, style is a writer's interdependent tendencies in defining tasks,
organizing information, describing situations, and crafting text forms. A
new pedagogy of style teaches that a writer's composing process reflects a
style of understanding situations, language, and texts.
Jesse
Kavadlo
Title: “Teaching Style as Content: Some
Sentence-Level Revision Strategies for First-Year
Composition”
In The Writer's Way, a popular first-year
writing book, Jack Rawlins compares style to clothing, "the decorative
covering we put over the content." For at least two decades,
teachers have tended to dichotomize content and style, or "substance"
and style, often at style's expense,
treating
it as an afterthought, ignoring it entirely, assigning separate grades for
each, or disparaging it. This presentation, though, will examine a number
of sentence-level concerns, including coordination and subordination, parallelism,
and variety, not as stylistic choices but as
crucial
to the creation of content-not "style [as] independent of content,"
as Rawlins continues, but that content may be dependant upon style.
I will suggest that for many students, particularly
those who still produce sentence-level errors, the separation of style and
content is counter-productive, and in fact one way to improve their content may
be to focus on, rather than look past, their sentences. I will use
examples culled from student writing in order to make the point that style can
be empowering, rather than humiliating, that certain students initially benefit
more from sentence-level attention than they do from holistic analysis, and
that treating sentence-level (local, lower-order) concerns before essay-level
(global, higher-order) concerns can usefully destabilize oppositions between
content and style, between rhetoric and ideas.
John
Tinker
Title: “Stylistic Analysis and the Pedagogy of
Style”
What can we accomplish with stylistic analysis of
literary texts, and how might we extend these accomplishments to the teaching
of style in writing classes? This
question is fundamental to my current literary scholarship—a study of William
Beckford’s style and its relationship to the emergence of homosexual voices in
British and American fiction—and to my teaching strategies in beginning and
advanced writing classes. For this
paper, I present the methods and findings of several recent stylistic analyses
of poetry and fiction, including Clement Hawes’ study of Christopher Smart’s
poetry, Omar Swartz’s rhetorical analysis of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Garrett Stewart’s study
of ligature in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Each of these studies argues that stylistic
innovations are essential to the effective articulation of a marginalized
subject. Drawing on the work of Victor
Villanueva, Peter Elbow, Donnell Alexander, and others, I extend the ideas that
arise from these stylistic analyses to a pedagogy of style, arguing that the
study of stylistic innovation in literary texts can inform our teaching of
writing, and concluding with several specific techniques for teaching style
that can help students from various backgrounds find academic voices that they
can powerfully inhabit.
Marshall
Myers
Title: “The Evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s Prose
Style: Some Speculations and
Conclusions”
While many scholars have closely examined Abraham
Lincoln’s prose style, few have carefully studied how he developed his majestic
prose. The evolution of Lincoln’s prose
style was the result of several interlocking influences. The first and most important influence was
his phenomenal love of the English language and his keen and abiding faith that
he could be successful by applying his meager education to the daunting task of
educating himself through reading and self-study. His biography is replete with examples of his interest in
language in all forms: poetry, sermons,
essays, and speeches. Lincoln was also
influenced by and championed the “plain style” movement in its nascence in the
middle of the nineteenth century America, making his prose particularly understandable
and effective to modern audiences.
Another method of educating himself as a writer was to employ
imitation: his study of other prose
pieces, particularly the King James version of the Bible, and Murray’s English Prose, made available to him at
an early age by his stepmother Sally Bush Lincoln. In addition, Lincoln was influenced by studying Hugh Blair’s Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,
the most popular textbook in rhetoric in the United States in Lincoln’s
lifetime, which provided the theoretical underpinnings for his development as a
prose stylists.
Curiously, Lincoln’s self-education as a writer
closely followed, in part, the pattern of training in writing taught by ancient
Greek and Roman rhetors, which began with training in grammar in order to
understand the makings of rhetorical schemes.
Such training also included some of the same books, like Aesop’s Fables and other works, which
provided his style with an understanding of the fundamental narrative backbone
so necessary to his development as a writer.
Studying the evolution of superb prose stylists like
Lincoln helps composition researchers better understand how successful writers
work. These lessons can then be adapted
and implemented in the composition classroom.