Spring 2020, Rhetorics of Style

(WA 01350 - 1; crn 24327)

Mondays and Wednesdays,
2:00 pm to 3:15 pm,
​Victoria 201

Office: Victoria 404
Note: Taking this course will fulfill the Elements of Language requirement for the Writing Arts major.

​Students who have already fulfilled the Elements of Language requirement may apply Rhetorics of Style to the Creative Writing Concentration or Minor.

Course Description

Rhetorics of Style introduces students to the theory and practice of writing with stylistic devices and strategies. Through studying, analyzing, experimenting and writing with a range of stylistic devices, students will develop a practical understanding of how to put figural language to use for persuasive, expository, and aesthetic ends, as well as develop an appreciation for the ethical implications of stylistic choices. 

Overview

In this course students will practice identifying stylistic choices, work to understand how style functions in context, and perform a range of stylistic maneuvers within a variety of writing situations.

Focusing on the rhetorical and stylistic dimensions of grammar, mechanics, and usage, students will learn to write with the force associated with the figural use of language--language that turns away from common everyday usage. Students will also learn to appreciate the ethical consequences of stylistic choices made to achieve a variety of ends, whether aesthetic, persuasive, or expository.

​Key to these aims is to identify the figural register in writing, wherein we focus on words and sentences and what they do, rather than what they indicate, or point to. In his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Richard Lanham claims that the figures of rhetoric testify “to a kind of verbal attention which looks at the verbal surface rather than through it,” and so tropes and schemes have “worked historically to teach a way of seeing” (79). Furthermore, as Rutgers (Camden) scholar William FitzGerald argues in “Stylistic Sandcastles” (2013), when we place style centrally, “the goals attendant to rhetorical education through style-focused pedagogies are most fully achievable” (47). What this means is that when we teach figures of speech and thought (tropes and schemes), students of writing become empowered to think, write, and create in ways that reflect what it means to be rhetorically educated—what it means to be receptive to differences beyond the familiar, and to be empowered to adapt to and respond appropriately to such differences with a growing repertoire of rhetorical maneuvers, such as those students will learn in this course.

Course Activities

Students will:
  • Become acquainted with a basic vocabulary of grammar that will allow students to identify and work with the parts of speech and basic sentence types;
  • Explore registers of language use, from the concrete to the abstract, and the transparent to the figural, and thereby gain a theoretical understanding and appreciation of the power of figural language;
  • Study and even master taxonomies of figures of speech and of thought (both as tropes and as schemes), so that students can identify stylistic choices in the writing of others and emulate these in their own writing;
  • Analyze how figures of speech and thought in writing work to produce a variety of effects in different audiences and within a range of contexts;
  • Appreciate the values at work within the range of stylistic choices writers make.

Required Texts

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase​. Berkeley, 2014.

​Harris, Robert A. Writing with Clarity and Style: A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers​. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Style adds to a thought all the circumstances needed to produce the whole effect which that thought ought to produce. --Stendhal​
From John Middleton Murray's  The Problem of Style​ 79