Chapter 10 What About Style
Writing With Style
- What constitutes a smartly chosen writing style depends on the rhetorical situation
- We define style as "thoughtful flexibility" (the ability to adapt our voice, word choice, sentence structure, rhetorical effects, and document design to different situations, expectations, or demands
Scholarly Style
- The universal rule for good style is for it to seem deliberate, with every word and sentence carefully chosen for its particular audience, purpose and situation
- Effective scholars try to write compelling prose that cannot possibly be misunderstood
Higher Order and Later Order Concerns
- Scholars typically concentrate on big-picture concerns in early drafts and more minute concerns later
- Revision focuses on higher order concerns (focus, development, organization, and whether our ideas make sense)
- Later concerns include grammar, punctuation, etc.
Three Reasons Not To Worry About Polishing Your Prose Until You Have Your Ideas Carved Out
- Perfectionism can cause writer's block
- Polishing can waste time and energy
- Editing while drafting is less effective (difficult to concentrate on everything at once)
Mechanics
- Refer to sentence-level concerns, which include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and usage
- Errors - significantly affect the meaning, add confusion, diminish credibility
- Grammar - involves the rules for how we use language traditionally or formally
- Usage - how most people actually use language in everyday conversations
- Punctuation - make our writing more readable; prevent confusion and reading fatigue by correctly punctuating sentences; helps communicate clearly (emphasize our argument and persuade readers subtly; create a spectrum of connections between ideas
- Intentional Errors - bend or break the mechanical rules for effect; use incomplete sentences, extra punctuation, or one-word answers because the prose reads better with the intentional error; some errors enhance the meaning or clarity of our message
Voice
- Scholarly writing often employs active voice, where the doer of the action (subject) comes before the object
- Passive voice reverses the sentence order, placing the object before the verb and subject
- Many readers prefer active voice because it's clearer and easier to read
Clarity and Vividness
- The point of writing is to communicate (if our style interferes with out ability to communicate, we've adopted the wrong style)
- To avoid an overly academic, pretentious style, consider using strong verbs
- Less can be more
- Vivid and precise language - helps incorporate details into your writing that help readers feel, see, and experience your message
Creative Choices We Make To Improve Style
- Imitation - useful technique for learning to write (imitating order writers whom you admire)
- Sentence Variation - writing multiple versions of a sentence
- Rhetorical variation: change the audience, purpose, or context
- Amplification: elaborate, exaggerate, or use analogy, metaphor, or simile
- Linguistic variation: substitute vocabulary or rearrange the order
- Genre translation: rewrite the sentence in verse, or as a Tweet
- Figure of Speech - use metaphors and analogies to introduce radically new concepts to each other or to explain specialized ideas to nonscientists; can create fresh understanding and even be used beyond the sentence level as argumentative techniques
Visual Design
- Carefully crafted visual elements can help use compose arguments in clear, vivid, and compelling ways; helps us present information, but it can itself become part of the message
Writing in Digital Space (online)
- Less is more; keep it simple and remember what we know about rhetoric: design with audience and purpose in mind
- Writing online is difference because: it's hypertextual (Internet facilitates foraging more than careful reading), it's always public, audiences move quickly, the Web is big and noisy (it's hard to be heard)
Proofreading and Editing
- Reading your writing aloud is a very effective technique that doesn't require much expertise but yields great results; hearing your own sentences can help you better imagine how your reader will experience your writing
- Reviewing With Others - check whether your main points come across clearly
- Use Technology - spell-checking tools; think carefully before you take your word processor's advice
Developing More Style
- Good writing connects with its reader
- Successful writers never stop collecting and perfecting their toolkit of writing skills and knowledge; grow through continued practice
- Always reader as a writer and Always write as a reader