I could literally go on for days about all I learned in this class this semester. Let me summarize by saying: I wish I had taken this course 2 years ago, before all the other writing courses I have had.
We started the semester with a question: What is Style? Without reading or studying, we just listed our thoughts on the subject. Here is what I wrote:
“’Style’ is a nebulous, shadowy creature that is hard to define, and changes like the wind. I think a person’s or business’s style includes the look and the voice they adopt in communications. That can be very eclectic or, in the case of a business, hopefully defined as a set of parameters that they call their ‘Brand’.”
So, after all the work I have done this semester—the writing, the reading, the pondering and reflecting—what do I now think style is?
I think style is one of the foundations upon which writing is built. Envision an old Greek building with huge columns holding the roof up; if writing were that building, style is one of the columns supporting it. I believe my original description of style was correct but incomplete. After this class, I can tell you more about what the different ingredients are that make up style.
I had no prior experience studying these elements of style and wish I had. In my writing classes last year, we talked a lot about rhetoric. The lessons this semester enhanced and enriched those topics greatly. I found it extremely difficult to wrap my brain around the concepts of rhetoric at the time and now I know this is what was missing; part of the foundation. I finally had an “a-ha” moment where the lights came on, so to speak, an “epiphany” that kept my brain from exploding at all the “deep thinking” required to get it through my thick skull. It would have been very helpful for me to have cemented the foundation first.
I reviewed what I have written about our studies throughout the semester and several topics come to mind when thinking about what I have learned. In one blog post I wrote:
“The more I read about how the Ancient Rhetoricians studied and defined rhetorical style, the more confused I got. Who could possibly remember all the different names of styles or canons, tropes or figures, ornaments or levels? I think they were all just trying to figure out how to pick up women, like Robin Williams said in Dead Poets Society…that being said, I did recognize several styles or ornaments or tropes or figures that I’ve seen in common use today.”
While it was new and overwhelming at the time I wrote that, the added lessons and reinforcements throughout the semester have helped me retain the information about style as taught by the ancient rhetoricians. But even if I hadn’t, I think what I wrote then about remembering the different tropes and figures, ornaments and levels, is still valid:
“Will I remember these terms? ‘Not bloody likely.’ Does it matter? Not at all. The point? That I recognize them as parts of rhetorical style and use them in writing. ‘Check’!”
We spent a good portion of the semester learning about the elements of style using two different books. We first read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, followed by Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. While they were on the same topic, they convey the lessons in such different styles that reading both books gives you the impression they are completely different. Williams is more conversational, more approachable and human in his instruction. People offended by Strunk’s drill sergeant style are soothed by Williams’ detailed explanations of his maxims with examples. I don’t think the examples from either book say anything contradictory, but it feels like they do simply because of their manner of conveying the message.
Some of my classmates didn’t think “feeling” was a valid consideration, but studies on social media and content marketing today show how messages that evoke strong feelings are the most successful. Maybe that explains why Strunk’s book is still around today. Ironically, I had purchased both of these books on recommendations by prior writing professors, but because they weren’t assigned reading, I never made the time outside of class to read them. I can safely say now that I am grateful we studied them so thoroughly in this class. Their lessons contained more crucial ingredients needed to build that pillar of writing style. The best part of learning so much about style is that I can now look at a piece of writing and analyze it within a framework that makes sense. This was evident when we did a short exercise evaluating and rewriting a short section of EMU’s course catalog. Before this class, I could look at a text and tell you whether I thought it was good or not, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you why; now, I can.
What also contributed to our learning on how to analyze or evaluate a text is that we studied genre and different methods of analysis, including actor network theory and discourse community analysis. As I said in one blog post:
“I never really thought about where genres came from or who made the ‘rules’ for different writing genres either. But it wasn’t that many years ago that there was no social media, so that was a new genre that people had to come up with a genre to go with it. And Twitter was a whole new genre itself, even though it was social media.”
In learning about genre, I was struck by the following part of Dirk’s essay:
“When people write, they draw on the genres they know, their own context of genres, to help construct their rhetorical action. If they encounter a situation new to them, it is the genres they have acquired in the past that they can use to shape their new action. Every genre they acquire, then, expands their genre repertoire and simultaneously shapes how they might view new situations. (Devitt, Writing 203)”
It dawned on me that over the years, I would also draw on acquired genres to create new texts. It was so comforting to learn how blessedly normal that was.
Marianne's WRTG 328W Blog 