style

Experimenting with Style: Cyborg Voices

Activities, genAI, grammar and mechanics, Process, rhetorical situation, Style /

Benjamin Hojem and Rhiannon Scharnhorst Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description From Aristotle’s correctness to Quintilian’s purity to Campbell’s nationality, rhetorical instruction in the formal qualities of writing has long emphasized stylistic “virtues” that serve to exclude language variants and their speakers. With this history in mind, how should we understand the capabilities and affordances […]

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Beautiful Sentences

Activities, Critical Language Awareness, grammar and mechanics, linguistic difference, punctuation, Style /

Mark Shea Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description We often associate metalinguistic terminology with an adherence to normative language standards in students’ writing. Basing metalinguistic practice on students’ own writing can also evoke demotivating and damaging episodes in prior educational contexts. A more productive way to incorporate a focus on metalinguistic language into writing courses

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Concise Writing Strategies

Activities, drafting and revising, grammar and mechanics, Style /

Elizabeth Blomstedt Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Students often rely on writing strategies that make their writing wordy and bloated—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes to make their writing sound more sophisticated, and sometimes to meet word count. Presenting students with concrete strategies for making their writing more direct, clear, and concise increases student awareness of their

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The Evolution of Imitation: Building Your Style

drafting and revising, reading to write, Volume 3 /

Craig A. Meyer Volume 3 Chapter Description This chapter focuses on incorporating imitation practices into a student’s writing toolbox. By encouraging students to look more rhetorically at writing through imitation, they learn to recognize that language is more dynamic, and they can approach writing tasks with more contemplative thought instead of as a dreaded task.

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Grammar, Rhetoric, and Style

grammar and mechanics, rhetorical appeals and argument, Volume 3 /

Craig Hulst Volume 3 Chapter Description This chapter focuses on grammar, specifically on understanding that grammar is much more than just the rules that we have been taught. Rather, grammar can be used rhetorically—with an understanding of the writing situation and making appropriate choices regarding the structure of the sentences, the use of punctuation, using

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Writing with Force and Flair

rhetorical appeals and argument, Volume 3 /

William T. FitzGerald Volume 3 Chapter Description Exposure to rhetorical figures, once central to writing pedagogy, has largely fallen out of favor in composition. This chapter reintroduces today’s students to the stylistic possibilities of figures of speech, drawing on an analogy to figure skating to illustrate how writing communicates with an audience through stylistic moves.

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I Need You to Say “I”: Why First Person Is Important in College Writing

Volume 1, writing myths and anxiety /

Kate McKinney Maddalena Volume 1 Chapter Description In this essay, I argue against the common misconception that “I” has no place in formal writing. I discuss many theoretical and rhetorical ways (objectivity and intellectual integrity, and clarity and organization, respectively) in which first person, used prudently, can improve written argument. I then show some examples

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Ten Ways to Think about Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Students

drafting and revising, Volume 2, writing myths and anxiety /

E. Shelley Reid Volume 2 Chapter Description Writing is hard. It’s harder if your students think of it as a collection of arbitrary rules than if they think of it as a human communication process they already understand a lot about. Using comparisons to familiar events (doing laundry, making fruit Jell-O, writing thank-you notes, and

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