CONTENTS Foreword Frank Farmer Acknowledgments vii xv Introduction: Moving Forward with Style Paul Butler, Brian Ray, and Star Medzerian Vanguri 3 S E C T I O N 1 : S T Y L E M E D I AT E S R E L AT I O N S H I P S 1. Cans of Worms: Tracing an Undergraduate Thesis-Writer’s Style Knowledge over Time Andrea R. Olinger 23 2. “Here’s What I Would Like for You to Know”: Epistolary Style as an Invitation to Read and Write Metonymically Melissa A. Goldthwaite 37 3. “Clarity” Really Means Rhythm: Toward a Psychoanalytic Poetics of Prose T. R. Johnson 53 4. Erasmus in the Professional Writing Classroom: Workplace Genre, Designing and Writing for the Web, and the Future of Style Tom Pace 66 SECTION 2: STYLE CONVEYS IDENTITY 5. The Stylized Portrayal of the Writing Life in Spike Jonze’s Her Cydney Alexis and Eric Leake 85 6. Stance as Style: Toward a Framework for Analyzing Academic Language Laura L. Aull and Zak Lancaster 98 7. Looking Forward to a Nice, Stupid, Future Style. R U? Jimmy Butts 114 Copyrighted material Not for distribution vi CoNTENTS 8. Metaphorical Translingualisms: The Hip-Hop Cipher as Stylistic Concept Eric A. House 133 S E C T I O N 3 : S T Y L E F O R M S S T R AT E G Y 9. Expectations of Exaltation: Formal Sublimity as a Prolegomenon to Style’s Unbounded Future Jarron Slater 147 10. Civil Style: Reexamining Discourse and Rhetorical Listening in Composition Laura L. Aull 160 11. Applied Legal Storytelling: Toward a Stylistics of Embodiment Almas Khan 173 12. What Style Can Add to Genre: Suggestions for Applying Stylistics to Disciplinary Writing Anthony Box 185 S E C T I O N 4 : S T Y L E C R E AT E S A N D T R A N S C E N D S B O U N DA R I E S 13. Point of Departures: Composition and Creative Writing Studies’ Shared Stylistic Values Jon Udelson 199 14. The Danger of Using Style to Determine Authorship: The Case of Luke and Acts Mike Duncan 213 15. Words, Words, Words, or Leveraging Lexis for a Pedagogy of Style William T. FitzGerald 227 About the Authors Index 247 245 Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction M OV I N G F O RWA R D W I T H S T Y L E Paul Butler, Brian Ray, and Star Medzerian Vanguri New uses of language often emerge at critical moments in history. While it is possible to examine many such moments (e.g., recessions, migrant caravans, mass shootings), the phenomenon seems especially powerful during natural disasters, when language change accompanies physical change, uniting the material and discursive. For example, in a blog about Hurricane Katrina, which forever changed the city of New Orleans, Dave Zirin (2007) writes, “To the people I spoke with, Katrina is a noun, an adjective and even a verb.” Kat Bergeron (2006) lists such new terms as “Katrina patina” (“the visible coating the storm left on people and things”) and “shud” (“the mucky substance deposited by Katrina, a cross between mud and sh--”) in her article “SLABBED! And Other Katrinaed Words; Katrina Patina.” In its aftermath, writes Zirin, the cyclone became “something ephemeral, a sadness seeped into the humidity. It gets into your clothes, your eyes, your hair.” Zirin’s post and Bergeron’s article suggest that the most dynamic aspect of language is its ability not only to respond to but also to adumbrate and, indeed, catalyze, change. In Style and the Future of Composition Studies, we contend the principal way that language and social change emerges is through style. While Zirin and Bergeron show how style transformed “Katrina” from a noun to an adjective and verb, coined new phrases, and personified the storm in unusual ways, our claim is that style is further capable of anticipating and enabling innovative ideas, voices, identities, and rhetorics. This is our position as editors, and, more broadly, it is a recurring theme in this volume, in which authors reimagine or invent such concepts as eavesdropping (Goldthwaite), trespass (Udelson), inscrutability and a “translingual style” (House), unconscious rhythm (Johnson), “possible selves” (Alexis and Leake), sublime transdisciplinarity (Slater), and “diplomatic evidentiality” (Aull), among others, to demonstrate how style effects change. Copyrighted material Not for distribution DoI: 10.7330/9781646420117.c000b 4 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I As a canon of rhetoric, style has always possessed an adaptive or protean quality that allows writers to shape their messages for particular purposes, audiences, and occasions. Indeed, style serves as a rich palette of choices, enabling writers to mix, match, blend, and combine language and other semiotic forms in ways that allow surprising meanings and possibilities to emerge. The view of style as inventive, as opposed to static or fixed, lies at the heart of work by scholars like M.A.K. Halliday, Mary Bucholtz, Elinor Ochs, Conrad Biber, Zak Lancaster, Laura Aull, and Andrea Olinger (this volume). As John Vance (2014, 140), drawing on Halliday, writes, “Languages are dynamic, open systems whose forms (to the extent that they are ‘formal’ at all) are contingent on a vast array of local, emergent, ‘bottom-up,’ functional language practices.” The same position undergirds the translingual approach to writing (see Horner et al. 2011; Canagarajah 2013; House, this volume). This dynamic, experimental quality of style reverberates throughout our collection, challenging all of us, as readers and writers, to rethink the ways style reads and writes us as a force of disciplinary action and change, and situating style as a crucible in the future of the discipline—its conversations, engagements, and areas of inquiry. A great deal has changed in the last decade since Susan Peck MacDonald published “The Erasure of Language” (2007), in which she describes the dissociation of sociolinguistics from composition and subsequent decline of attention to sentence-level issues in writing. Like Robert Connors (2000), MacDonald poignantly articulates the impact of language and style’s erasure from the discipline—especially on students. In fact, the past several years have seen the very resurgence of style that scholars such as Tom Pace and Paul Butler have anticipated. Articles on style and language have begun appearing in journals again. Books such as The Centrality of Style (Duncan and Vanguri 2013), Style: An Introduction (Ray 2014), and Performing Prose (Holcomb and Killingsworth 2010) have helped to restore the idea of style as a facilitator of agency and creativity. These recent works have built on foundational texts by Butler, Johnson and Pace, and Lanham. They have also gone well beyond simply lamenting the absence of style from disciplinary conversations and have articulated what style has to offer composition, as well as how new orientations to writing and rhetoric prompt a reconception of style itself. In other words, we have made a central pivot from defending style’s place in research and teaching toward exploring it from more diverse perspectives and identifying its latent presence in contemporary scholarship—including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language difference, and digital rhetorics. Researchers on style have just begun to articulate the points Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 5 of connection between our work and these current trends in the field. These new fusions hold a great deal of promise for the study of style, but also for the discipline in general, as they enable unexpected approaches to writing instruction that value and embrace discursive contingency and dexterity. We are now in the process of repurposing style so that it can contribute to the writing instruction designed for the twenty-first century, an era characterized by media convergence, rapid genre evolution, and accelerated globalization. Our shared goals run deep, in that we need to prepare students to be able to compose in a range of settings and circumstances and to adapt to evolving discursive environments. How does the book reflect the many ways an inventive style forces us to recalibrate how we write, read, and, indeed, think about language and meaning in the twenty-first century? The following sections lay out some of the capabilities of style by identifying key actions it performs. These categories could easily be combined or rearranged to reveal even more possibilities, as they merge, blend, overlap, move, and situate themselves in the interest of stylistic virtuosity and transformation. S T Y L E M E D I AT E S R E L AT I O N S H I P S The future of style in composition studies anticipates style as a vehicle for different and diverse voices to emerge—rhetorically, from exigence, audience, occasion, context. One major focus in research on style involves shifting relationships between rhetors and audiences. Until recently, work on style has prioritized writers and the development of their voices—without a full consideration of the role readers play or how style is co-constructed. In her Rhetoric Review piece, “A Sociocultural Approach to Style,” Andrea Olinger offers a dynamic definition and theory of style to frame future studies, one that moves beyond a relationship in which “writers engineer style, and the readers, universally, understand the writers’ intent” (2016, 124). Olinger draws on research in sociocultural linguistics in order to present a model of style recognizing it as always emerging rather than static and fixed. Her full definition describes style as the “dynamic co-construction of typified indexical meanings (types of people, practices, situations, texts) perceived in a single sign or a cluster of signs and influenced by participants’ language ideologies” (125). This definition demonstrates style’s function as mediator, in that style refers not just to the writers’ choices but the readers’ as well, and the meanings they create together. For Olinger, and other authors in this collection, style is always in flux as it negotiates the multiple value systems at play between language users. Copyrighted material Not for distribution 6 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I The works in this collection share a vision of style as dynamic, shared, co-constructed, emergent, and performed. This model holds a great deal of explanatory power. We can use style not just to inform how we teach students to write well but also as an analytical tool to investigate the language, discourse, and semiotic practices of writers and speakers in a range of contexts, with an emphasis on their relationships with audiences. Specifically, several contributions to this collection offer conceptions of how style mediates relationships between writers and audiences. Andrea Olinger’s chapter in this volume, “Cans of Worms,” brings style into dialogue with research on transfer as a way of furthering her project of defining style as co-constructed and dynamic. This piece follows a college student named Corinne, whose understanding of her writing style and that of her advisers adapts as she negotiates their expectations—as well as their performances of style in their own publications. As Olinger shows, “styles may be composed of signs with conflicting or heterogenous indexical meanings,” for example, in a short sentence seen by different readers as both “to the point” but also “flowery” if it employs a metaphor (chapter 1). This ethnographic study demonstrates how writers do in fact change their perceptions and practice of styles over time in response to interactions with audiences and also transfer styles across their writing situations and contexts. Readers might see the same stylistic traits differently, use different language to describe those traits, and even contradict themselves and each other when expressing their own perceptions and expectations about style. Like Olinger, Ellen Carillo (2010, 2014) extends style beyond writers’ choices; for Carillo, though, style serves as a way to reinvigorate the importance of reading in composition studies and its connection to writing. For both Carillo and Olinger, style serves as a way to reintegrate reading and writing after a period of their separation, most likely caught in the divide between literary and composition studies. We argue that style unites the process of reading and writing by making the two interactive, a kind of antiphonal effect in which the reader recalibrates the writer and the writer stands in the shoes of, or in the place of, the reader, in an act of rhetorical collaboration. In “Here’s What I Would Like for You to Know” (chapter 2), Melissa Goldthwaite continues the same idea in this volume, stating the important role of eavesdropping in epistolary writing, with the reader occupying the role of eavesdropper: “Readers are always, often unconsciously, negotiating their identifications and disidentifications—the ways they are or are not the intended audience for a piece of writing. Epistolary writing, however, makes that negotiation more explicit, encouraging readers Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 7 either to identify with the audience being invoked or to consciously inhabit the role of eavesdropper.” Goldthwaite sees this negotiable process at work in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. She writes: Because the book is addressed to Coates’ 15-year-old son, readers can eavesdrop—perhaps listening with empathy, understanding the love that prompts this father to communicate honestly with his child about the injustices that all Americans should face but that some have no choice but to face because of the bodies they inhabit. T. R. Johnson’s chapter in this volume, “‘Clarity’ Really Means Rhythm,” also emphasizes the relationship between writers and audiences and its implications for style. Addressing the conventional notion of clarity, Johnson reintroduces the concept of rhythm as helping to sustain a successful dynamic between readers and authors. As he argues, “we all know that what is meant by clarity is . . . a successful authoraudience relationship,” and “the key to this relationship can be captured in one word: rhythm” (chapter 3). Attention to patterns and cadences in writing that reflect elements of spoken discourse can help writers, including college students, craft discourse that generates, inflects, and sustains meaning by syncing with a reader’s own expectations for repetition of sounds and units of language. Examples include emphasis, flow, alliteration, and parallelism, oral elements we generally neglect in many genres of writing. Tom Pace’s chapter, “Erasmus in the Professional Writing Classroom,” offers a pedagogical approach that introduces students to the relationship between writers and readers, as mediated by genre and stylistic conventions. As Pace argues, “adhering to traditional textbook-based stylistic exercises in the professional writing classroom often does not prepare these students for what employers require of them in the workplace” (chapter 4). Instead, Pace’s students, in an upper-level professional writing course, complete a number of genre-based projects ranging from memos and grant proposals to websites for local companies. The course provides scaffolding for each project that prompts students to pay attention to stylistic affordances and expectations. He states that in asking students to learn various stylistic strategies for workplace genres and to practice writing them in the classroom, they can then adapt these strategies to numerous rhetorical situations: “The assignments and their attention to style challenge students’ preconceived conceptions of style and teach them numerous strategies for adapting these stylistic elements to both workplace and academic settings.” Indeed, for Pace, “teaching students various stylistic strategies for addressing workplace genres allows students to become better equipped Copyrighted material Not for distribution 8 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I to write for various audiences and purposes.” This chapter represents our broader goal to move even further beyond the commonplace perception of style as simply correctness or adherence to rules, a view that many of Pace’s students admit to holding at the beginning of the semester. The key goal for any college writing course, and perhaps especially upper-level courses in professional and technical writing, lies in helping students understand that style involves choices and active decision-making, as well as negotiations with readers and generic expectations. Pace shows the ways in which his students are effectively border crossers when it comes to writing in the disciplines and using style as the means by which they slip in and out of different territory in writing across curricular differences. STYLE CONVEYS IDENTITY Every time we write or speak, we define and redefine our identity through style. Michel Foucault (1994) explains an author’s different identities as, for instance, the voice he or she uses in a narrative account versus the voice in the preface of a text. In each case, different “selves” are required. Foucault later says in an interview that identity is based on differentiation, creation, and innovation. The future of style in composition studies is tied to ever-changing identities and the way these identities are represented or performed stylistically. Style, we assert, can be seen as a common denominator for identity, constantly in a process of adaptation and reinvention. These characteristics of stylistic identity are at the heart of T. R. Johnson’s argument about rediscovering the oral rhythms within our unconscious minds. Arguing for a link between training in style, athletics, and musical training in Greece, Johnson probes something deep within the unconscious that brings about the same type of identity performance normally tied to innovation, transformation, and change. For Johnson, this fusion of identity and style, based on unconscious rhythms, is closely linked to writing: Given the deep roots of what we might today call a style-based pedagogy in the athletic and musical training of the ancient Greeks, the way the old oralist rhythms still haunt our most thrilling experiences of texts, one can’t help but suppose that this territory is still with us at the level of the unconscious. In ways we only dimly understand, it continues to flash into view from time to time in contemporary discussions about how people should learn how to write. Similarly, Cydney Alexis and Eric Leake (chapter 5) invoke theories of “possible selves” (imagining oneself in a role or occupation correlates Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 9 with the ability to achieve it) to argue for a symbiotic merger of style and identity. As the authors foreground, style enables voices to speak that have not been heard before. What is fresh, original, innovative, and transformative finds voice through style because what needs to be said comes to the surface and insists on being heard. They write: “Style influences the ways people identify themselves as speakers and actors, as readers and writers. Research on possible selves and analysis of the stylized identities in popular portrayals of writers . . . help us focus on how the writerly self is made available and performed.” On a practical level, Alexis and Leake see an important connection between possible selves and composition researchers: “How writing is styled and how writers are stylized on screen provides an entry point for writing studies scholars to understand the circulation of stereotypes around writing and the cultural availability of possible writer identities.” Laura Aull and Zak Lancaster (chapter 6) also make a strong argument for the importance of voice and identity in an emerging discursive style. They state: “Writers’ stylistic choices . . . are driven largely by interpersonal considerations. These include the ‘voice’ or authorial persona the writer wishes to project; the relationship with the reader the writer seeks to create; and the writer’s engagement and negotiation with others’ views and voices in the discourse.” The authors see these stylistic features as “resources for asking new questions about writing” and as a way in which style brings about change by “meeting the demands of other academic, disciplinary, and generic writing situations.” Overall, the authors project a case for a dynamic style, mediated by voice and identity and constantly interacting with the rhetorical situation to produce discursive change. Digital rhetoric and the digital humanities have given us the ability to produce new forms of meaning, with many different combinations of verbal, nonverbal, symbolic, and multimodal tools. We argue that style’s future in composition studies contemplates its role as the arbiter of online expression, serving to coordinate, rearrange, and mediate among various modes of expression. Multimodal and visual elements produce new styles, while style offers options of ways in which these elements can be combined. Jimmy Butts (chapter 7) sees new forms of digital and multimodal expression as leading to what he says some may call a “stupid style.” Claiming that “stupidity has its own power,” Butts sees imperfection as part of stylistic innovation, urging everyone to embrace what might seem like error. He writes: “Language will always be deployed imperfectly, stupidly. One day, when we finally accept this, we can be kinder to each other as more hospitable audiences of language. Copyrighted material Not for distribution 10 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I As such, a stupid style offers efficiencies, resistances, and sites of invention or of ‘thinking otherwise.’” Butts thus sees advantages in multimodal and digital elements of style as opening up the effects of language and recognizing the stylistic importance in what might formerly have been considered “error” or, to use his word, stupidity, in writing. Congruent with this new view, compositionists have started attending to the ways in which writers as well as speakers use language strategically in order to convey stances, construct identities, engage in social interactions, and craft personas for a range of situations. Just as people style their hair and clothes, they style their discourse to convey their attitudes toward the world while expressing or performing different elements of their identity. As Nikolas Coupland observes, style refers to “a way of doing something” (Coupland 2009, 1). It “marks out or indexes a social difference . . . a degree of crafting,” and production of meaning. Someone may intentionally use an expression or part of speech to indicate their membership in a social group or to mark a level of status and authority. Or they might stylize their discourse to perform a persona. This view toward style recognizes it as the “fleeting interactional moves through which speakers take stances, create alignments, and construct personas” (Bucholtz 2009, 147). When someone decides to incorporate a different dialect, vernacular, or slang into their writing, they’re styling their discourse in order to construct a persona that achieves a specific effect on readers—one that the reader may engage with or reject. Even pronoun choice in a scholarly article qualifies as a stylistic decision, one in which the writer is actively trying to establish a relationship with readers and, as Olinger observes, “may index a particular class, ethnicity, gender, and/or locale” (2016, 125). Therefore, it is not for writing teachers to accept or reject the use of a particular nonstandard form but rather to understand why a student has chosen one form over the other and what meanings they intend to convey to us and other audiences. Once teachers understand and appreciate the indexical implications behind acts of language difference, they are in a better position to help students hone their writing across these different codes and modes—without imposing their own agendas. The question of language change has been at the forefront of the field recently through the introduction of translingualism and code meshing as the blending, merging, and meshing of accents, dialects, and varieties of English (Young, Martinez, and Naviaux 2011). Bruce Horner and others have said a translingual approach sees difference in language as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening. Suresh Canagarajah (2013) goes on to say that Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 11 “speaking and writing are not acts of transferring ideas or information mechanically, but of achieving communicative objectives with art, affect, voice, and style.” We argue that all of these communicative objectives (art, affect, voice, and style) are style—whether different aspects of style or different ways we express or explain things stylistically. We recognize translingualism and code meshing as indispensable approaches to embracing language difference, and we also contend that the blending, merging, and effects produced by these resources are often achieved through stylistic choice. In the future, then, it is incumbent upon us to explore how style works in conjunction with a translingual approach to writing in order to express language difference in composition studies. As Bruce Horner and his coauthors argue in their opinion essay “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” (2011), “This [translingual] approach thus calls for more, not less, conscious and critical attention to how writers deploy diction, syntax, and style, as well as form, register, and media. It acknowledges that deviations from dominant expectations need not be errors; that conformity need not be automatically advisable; and that writers’ purposes and readers’ conventional expectations are neither fixed nor unified” (304). In this volume, Eric House experiments with his own translanguaging, code meshing, and the use of a “translingual style.” House’s chapter uses hip-hop, which he calls “a valuable and generative space where discourses and language practices are continually negotiated (Petchauer 2012),” to argue for a “translingual style” that relies on “discourses of translingualism [to] describe difference as the norm in language practice (Horner and Lu 2013).” House uses his conception of a translingual style to make a generative argument for “inscrutability,” a theoretical concept that, he argues, “invites critique and openness” by defying normative discourses. Ultimately, House sees the significance of inscrutability, viewed through the metaphor of the hip-hop cipher, as promoting difference in writing studies. He states, “An emphasis on an inscrutable style in rhetoric and composition might then teach us the nuances of difference and its impacts on the flows and movements in theories and pedagogies of writing.” Indeed, the idea of an inscrutable style challenges us to re-see language as always emerging, continually innovating. S T Y L E F O R M S S T R AT E G Y For Jarron Slater (chapter 9), language change comes in a different form. He sees the classical notion of the sublime as enabling stylistic Copyrighted material Not for distribution 12 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I change through a transdisciplinary approach to language and discourse, one that brings audiences and speakers or writers together through a cooperation with each other he describes as “empowered” and “exalted.” In the chapter, “Expectations of Exaltation,” he proposes the notion of sublimity as originally introduced by Longinus and developed by Kenneth Burke. For Slater, sublimity “creates expectations of exaltation and then invites the audience to fulfill those expectations through their participatory and emancipated cooperation.” His argument builds on Burke’s definition of the sublime as “elation wherein the audience feels as though it were not merely receiving, but were itself creatively participating in the poet’s or speaker’s assertion” (Burke 1969, 57–58). According to Slater, “formal sublimity unbinds style because it shows how style, rhetoric, and poetics are not separate ‘things’ but are forever intertwined. Formal sublimity does not limit ‘style’ to a narrow ‘canon’ of rhetoric. Its very principle argues for a priori transdisciplinarity, one that has style having something to say on everything from the smallest syllable to the grandest reaches of the universe, and beyond.” For Slater, the impact of style, and its effect on transdisciplinary change, is limitless. The use of figures, tropes, and schemes might aim not simply to embellish or amplify discourse in a conventional sense, but to draw in audiences as co-constructors of meaning. Innovating style and composition studies has called on us as researchers to broaden our disciplinary identities, seeking to understand who else studies style and what methods and terms they use. Scholarship in sociolinguistics and discourse studies has expanded the horizons of stylistic study. As such, we have solicited work from scholars who cross disciplinary boundaries, drawing on corpus and discourse studies. Corpus studies by Zak Lancaster have already helped us investigate the accuracy of language patterns in textbooks such as They Say/I Say, specifically the extent to which they truly represent discourse conventions in academic writing. Laura Aull’s (2015) work on first-year writing has also generated reliable, data-driven insights into students’ acquisition of subjective pronouns, in order to counter myths about use of the first-person in academic writing. Further corpus investigations of style will help us learn more about the ways in which people use language interactively and indexically. Contributions by Laura Aull and Zak Lancaster show the power of linguistic analysis to inform students’ acquisition and navigation of academic discourse. In their co-authored chapter, “Stance as Style” (chapter 6), Aull and Lancaster demystify aspects of academic conventions by identifying “highly patterned stylistic features” and illustrating how “the Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 13 unique stylistic qualities of academic prose become especially visible when seen through the lens of stance,” which the authors define as “the writers’ many ‘micro’ expressions of attitudes, evaluations, epistemic commitment, and interaction with the reader.” Their chapter outlines three major stances that occur in academic prose along with corresponding features such as attitude markers, self-mentions, concessions, adversative connectors, hedges, and boosters. They show how instructors can introduce these terms to students, grounding their discussion in helpful examples of student writing and classroom activities. Laura Aull’s single-authored chapter, “A Civil Style” (chapter 10), also employs functional linguistics and discourse analysis in order to introduce a new term, “diplomatic evidentiality” (a civil style that, in Aull’s words, features “both ‘rhetorical listening’—a stance of openness in relation to other texts and views [Ratliffe 2005]—and a writer’s own convictions, in that order”), into current approaches to civil discourse in college writing instruction. As Aull notes, research on civil discourse has curiously overlooked the role of actual language strategies and markers. Attending more closely to stance markers and evidentials, Aull claims, gives writers ways of “projecting honesty, modesty, and proper caution in self-reports, and for diplomatically creating research space in areas heavily populated by other researchers” (Swales, quoted in Aull 1990, 175). Here, teachers can see how style contributes to much more than adherence to rules or conventions. In fact, the choices they make in diction and sentence construction contribute to the overall stance and attitude that readers will perceive, which in turn affects their reception. Such work confirms and reminds us about the importance of language, tone, and voice and their role in mitigating or exacerbating conflicts—as when politicians and celebrities alike seem to enjoy exchanging barbs over social media, only elevating the toxicity of public discourse. By pointing to the importance of ethics and civility in the discursive realm, Aull helps the field reimagine a discourse, based on diplomatic evidentiality, that reinvents the very nature of argument, effectively rebalancing logos, pathos, and ethos within the rhetorical situation. We have also worked to expand our understanding of writing and where it happens. Writing doesn’t just occur in the academy, and stylistic innovations appear on the web every day through new words, new turns of phrase, and new grammatical constructions. To fully understand style, we need to study it in personal journals, newspapers, blogs, and social media. A turn toward quantitative, empirical data also characterizes the new direction in the study of style. Until recently, studies of style have been limited by a tendency to form a general impression of a writer’s Copyrighted material Not for distribution 14 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I style, or to speculate about the effects of stylistic decisions on readers. Work on corpus linguistics offers new and better tools for studying meaningful patterns across large bodies of texts. Doing so allows us to make stronger, more reliable claims about the stylistic conventions within a certain discipline or genre. It also enables us to see with greater precision how writers negotiate, deviate, and innovate with regard to these expectations. While discourse-based studies have always attended to the study of language in action, stylistic analysis adds a new dimension by showing how style, or stylization, is used to bring about a reversal in the very nature of discourse. What is notable here is that discourse, almost always closely connected to different genres, has been used to achieve specific effects. But style disrupts conventional genres, turning discourse on its head to expose inherent biases in language, gender, social interactions, and culture. It calls discourse into question and, in the process, engenders a new form of discourse inherently connected to, but changed from, its original forms. For Almas Kahn (chapter 11), legal discourse takes on new forms through the work of Applied Legal Storytelling (ALS), in which authors often begin with personal stories or vignettes for the purpose of “humanizing real-life actors in the legal system” through style, using tone, imagery, allusions, diction, and other features. ALS discourse gives new life to legal reasoning through its stylistic possibilities. In the case of a transgender bathroom rights case, Kahn argues, the judge cites a teen’s “compelling statement” to a school board in the teen’s YouTube video, bringing in visual and digital rhetoric, and forging a new, emergent form of legal discourse. In “What Style Can Add to Genre” (chapter 12), Anthony Box suggests that strengthening connections between disciplinary writing and style can increase genre awareness. When writers are aware of the stylistic options available to them and can consciously choose them, they are better equipped to “question, interact with, and redefine the genres they participate in.” However, style is often incorporated superficially in academic writing, out of habit rather than choice. As an example, Box analyzes the “faked coherence” present in metalanguage within samples of published prose. Instead, he argues, an internalized stylistic awareness can lead to variety, originality, and memorability. S T Y L E C R E AT E S A N D T R A N S C E N D S B O U N DA R I E S As style relates to both convention and deviation, it serves participatory, community-establishing functions, while also acting as gatekeeper. Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 15 Recent scholarship demonstrates how style reinforces and disrupts genre boundaries, disciplinary boundaries, and divisions between public and private. In an important article that drew a well-known response from Charles Bazerman, Anthony Fleury proposes that skills in public speaking are emblematic of styles of communication. He writes: Liberal education can be advanced through strategic use of core styles throughout the curriculum. Core styles of expression, exposition, and persuasion—which are foundational to but transcend disciplinary styles—provide tools for understanding, performing, critiquing, and resisting knowledge and identity production. A dialectic of Communication Against the Disciplines and CID [Communication in the Disciplines] would encourage in students multiple and diverse ways of thinking and doing. Approached this way, CXC [Communication Across the Curriculum] can help the student become a model citizen, able to not only argue well for a position but embody a democratic mix of multiple voices, to articulate the world from many positions. (2005, 72) Even though Fleury was primarily addressing readers in communications studies, his remarks have been widely taken up in the field of rhetoric and composition. Bazerman, for instance, suggests that “advocates of the centrality of style, such as Fleury, may find ways of talking about how the styles that disciplines use to express their intellectual work are closely tied to the life, meaning, and accomplishment of these knowledge-creating communities” (2005, 89). Bazerman continues in a statement relevant to the current volume, stating, “This close connection between the styles of communication and the most fundamental projects, meanings, and vitality of the disciplines has made the study of disciplinary writing and the practice of writing across the curriculum deeply rewarding and engaging endeavors” (89). What is striking is the relevance of Fleury’s remarks, not to mention Bazerman’s, to what authors in this volume have contributed in this area, especially the emphasis on multiple voices coming from interdisciplinary stylistic approaches. In “Points of Departure” (chapter 13), Jon Udelson addresses the recriminations some face in “trespassing” a disciplinary Maginot Line between creative writing and composition studies. In his chapter, subtitled “Composition and Creative Writing Studies’ Shared Stylistic Values,” he writes: “The ability to style one’s writing by the common conventions of a particular discipline . . . aids in marking a writer as part of the discipline and the believed epistemological terrain it governs. From a disciplinary perspective, treading that terrain otherwise constitutes an act of trespassing.” In a sign of the change signaled by the authors in this collection, Udelson aims to trespass, to usher in a new level of communication, erasing the truism that “[c]omposition cannot speak of Copyrighted material Not for distribution 16 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I creative writing because composition is still all too often thought of as the domain of ‘general writing skills instruction’ (Petraglia 1995), while creative writing exists in a domain beyond mere ‘skill.’” Udelson invites trespass as a new way to erase the divide between the two fields and allow new possibilities to emerge across disciplines. Mike Duncan (chapter 14) uses his skillful analysis to take up different disciplinary approaches and discover the truth about stylistic forgery in the New Testament. He writes: “Similar style could easily mean the opposite—a ‘school’ of forgers writing in that style, borrowing the ethos of the original. Accordingly, I argue that a stylistic imitator . . . wrote Acts—and that all the evidence arrayed in support of common authorship can be reversed to support two different authors.” In suggesting that scholars look seriously at “critical factual inconsistencies,” he argues that “ultimately, the initial sensing of ‘something’s off’ may happen at the style level, but defensible proof of ‘something’s off’ requires close reading of content and context.” William FitzGerald (chapter 15) offers the metaphor of the writing classroom as makerspace and style as craft to argue for renewed attention to the word in composition. Like all makers, writers must have comfort and fluency with the tools they use to create. Yet students often “arrive at college poorly resourced in terms of lexis.” By increasing our attention to the word in composition pedagogy, we can “help students better access and leverage their stock of verbal resources.” To make a case for a lexical pedagogy that interweaves style and invention, FitzGerald looks to the past, to the dominant narratives in our discipline that have either outright rejected style or emphasized sentences over words. The essay leaves us to imagine a pedagogical approach that treats style as “tinkering” and empowers students to explore, play with, and master the “material dimensions of words and the labor that adds to their value.” Indeed, FitzGerald argues that we make space for style and style makes space for emergent and inventive meanings. CONCLUSION We argue that style stands at the future of composition studies. We see it as an open frontier that invites crossing divides, providing access, and celebrating difference. The contributions to this collection recognize style as inventive and innovative and prompt us to consider a number of ways to harness these attributes. They urge us to see style as a tool for engaging audiences through dynamic co-construction of meaning, recalibrating binaries, renegotiating identities, and traversing Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 17 disciplinary spaces. We hope readers will come away from our collection with an understanding of how to use style for opening up new emergent approaches to writing, reading, thinking, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We see style as contributing to the growth of the discipline, now and in the future. As editors, we focused our efforts on guiding individual contributors and on shaping the volume to help ensure its parts speak dialogically, collaboratively, collectively, and divergently and move across, between, among, and around questions, ideas, and meanings. The general public may still define style by way of conventional manuals like Strunk and White’s influential but outdated Elements of Style. Even here, public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker (2015) have challenged conventional ways of thinking about style, moving discourse away from platitudes about correctness and convention and toward more nuanced approaches that embrace the inevitable mutability of language. While linguistic purists might bemoan the appearance of new words and phrases in the wake of momentous events and sociopolitical upheaval, contemporary stylisticians welcome them and see them as central catalysts for effective communication. As realities change, so must the styles we use to convey our perceptions of them. Nevertheless, the future work of rhetoricians will always involve efforts to counter the myth that style only involves following rigid rules about grammar and usage. We see stylistically engaging writing in a broad range of genres and disciplines. Not only that, but style often plays a key role in the evolution of these written forms. Writers refashion these forms themselves, finding new ways to make meaning through manipulation of the existing stylistic conventions and constraints. In every case their stylings of discourse facilitate their intentions and reinvent the forms of writing they use. As much as any other canon or approach to rhetoric, style fosters agency and ingenuity in language. One shared goal among all teachers and researchers in our discipline lies in the value we see and promote in such autonomy and adaptability. Every single chapter in this collection conveys one inflection of our central message about the inventive, generative potential of style. It may involve innovations on the sentence level or regarding word choice. More broadly, attunement to style offers new approaches to a variety of aspects within the discipline, from writing across the curriculum to the role of civil discourse in first-year composition. Just as changing knowledge in the discipline has influenced the way stylisticians think about language, we hope that new knowledge in style will give teachers and researchers concepts, frameworks, and strategies for attending to the stylistic dimensions of our shared endeavors, now and into the future. Copyrighted material Not for distribution 18 PA U L B U T L E R , B R I A N R AY, A N D S TA R M E D Z E R I A N VA N G U R I REFERENCES Aull, Laura. 2015. First-Year University Writing: A Corpus-Based Study with Implications for Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bazerman, Charles. 2005. “A Response to Anthony Fleury’s ‘Liberal Education and Communication against the Disciplines’: A View from the World of Writing.” Communication Education 54 (1): 86–91. Bergeron, Kat. 2006. “SLABBED! and Other Katrinaed Words; Katrina Patina.” Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS), May 21, 2006. Sunherald.com. Bucholtz, Mary. 2009. “From Stance to Style: Gender, Interaction, and Indexicality in Mexican Immigrant Youth Slang.” In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by Alexandra Jaffe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Paul. 2008. Out of Style. Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State University Press. Canagarajah, Athelstan Suresh. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge. Carillo, Ellen. 2010. “(Re)Figuring Composition through Stylistic Study.” Rhetoric Review 29 (4): 379–394. Carillo, Ellen. 2014. Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer. Logan: Utah State University Press. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: Random House. Connors, Robert J. 2000. “The Erasure of the Sentence.” College Composition and Communication 52: 96–128. Coupland, Nikolas. 2009. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, Mike, and Star Medzerian Vanguri. 2013. The Centrality of Style. Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse. Fleury, Anthony. 2005. “Liberal Education and Communication against the Disciplines.” Communication Education 54 (1): 72–79. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Halliday, M.A.K., and Christian Matthiessen. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. New York: Routledge. Holcomb, Chris, and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. 2010. Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. 2013. “Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, and Matters of Agency.” College English 75 (1): 586–611. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. 2011. “Opinion: Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” College English 73 (3): 303–321. Lancaster, Zak. 2016. “Do Academics Really Write This Way? A Corpus Investigation of Moves and Templates.” In “They Say / I Say.” College Composition and Communication 67 (3): 437–464. Lanham, Richard. 2007. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, Susan Peck. 2007. “The Erasure of Language.” College Composition and Communication 58 (4): 585. Ochs, E. 1992. “Indexing Gender.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, edited by D. Alessandro and C. Goodwin, 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olinger, Andrea R. 2016. “A Sociocultural Approach to Style.” Rhetoric Review 35 (2): 121–134. Copyrighted material Not for distribution Introduction: Moving Forward with Style 19 Pace, Tom. 2009. In Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy, edited by T. R. Johnson and Tom Pace. Pinker, Steven. 2015. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Books. Ratcliffe, Krista. 2005. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ray, Brian. 2014. Style: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse. Vance, John. 2014. “Pedagogy: Reconsiderations and Reorientations.” PhD diss., University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. Young, Vershawn Ashanti. 2004. “Your Average Nigga.” College Composition and Communication 55 (4): 693–715. Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Aja Martinez, with Julie Anne Naviaux. 2011. “Introduction: Code-Meshing as World English.” Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Zirin, Dave. 2007. “And Still They Rise: Confronting Katrina.” Rising Tide Blog. The Rising Tide Conference 2. August 29, 2007. Copyrighted material Not for distribution