CONTENTS
Foreword
Frank Farmer
Acknowledgments
vii
xv
Introduction: Moving Forward with Style
Paul Butler, Brian Ray, and Star Medzerian Vanguri
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Introduction: Moving Forward with Style
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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.
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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
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Introduction: Moving Forward with Style
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Introduction: Moving Forward with Style
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“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
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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
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Introduction: Moving Forward with Style
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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