3.33 Ways: Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media

8/7/2019 3.33 Ways: Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media

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Our inquiry into style opens with nine rhetorical tropes elaborated in Crowley andHawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students: onomatopoeia, antonomasia,metonymy, periphrasis, hyperbaton, hyperbole, synecdoche, catachresis, and metaphor.Students already know some of these by name (e.g., metaphor); others are familiar asconcepts although they have not encountered by name (e.g., periphrasis). This

preliminary enframing of style gradually expands to include other terms and conceptsrelated specifically to syntax analysis (for description and revision), Twitter, imagetext,and comics. After charting tropes and other stylistic qualities operating in the prose

passage, students select three out of four remakes to create.

Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media

4. Deliver (Ignite-style)

“Most talk about style, by professional critics as well as amateurs, leaves much to bedesired: it is often subjective, impressionistic, unhelpful, sometimes

misleading” (156)—VirginiaTu+e,“The Relation of Grammar to Style”

With Tufte’s provocation in mind, I developed an assignment concerned with thee x t e n s i o n of stylistic qualities from prose through new media. Theassignment is called 3.33 Ways to Digital Style. Why three? Students choose a three-

paragraph passage of nonfiction prose and, keying on identifiable stylistic qualities inthe original, remake the passage three ways with the aim of intensifying, and therebyrendering more conspicuous, particular rhetorical effects. Why one-third? One-third is

a repeating number; it enlists a “viniculum” or overline to indicate its patternedrecurrence. The assignment brings to light a similar logic operating in stylisticcontinuations arching across the prose to new media remakes. A five-minute, image-intensive Ignite-style presentation caps the assignment.

3.33 WaysD e r e k N . M u e l l e r E a s t e r n M i c h i g a n U n i v e r s i t y d e r e k . m u e l l e r @ e m i c h . e d u

An experiment forty years ago…

1. Select

Course Context

Syntax Analysis

Twitter

Imagetext Triptych

Web Comic

I first developed 3.33 Ways to Digital Style for ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology,a writing-intensive course I teach regularly at Eastern Michigan University. The courseenrolls undergraduates from a wide variety of majors and minors, including our major

in Written Communication and our Writing Minor. Nearly half of the students in anysection of the course are pre-service teachers who will soon be student-teaching. Thetriple-focus on writing, style, and technology is at times difficult to juggle. Remake-

based assignments like this one, however, create explicit alignments between stylefor prose and style for new media that accord with the goals of the course. Acrossmultiple scales, considering style first as a family of tropes introduces a durableframework that effectively holds together writing, style, and technology.

Following a period of exploration,students select a three-paragraphpassage of non-fiction prose. They

will be working extensively with theirrespective passages, so I encouragethem to follow their interests and

choose carefully. The passage shouldpop with stylistic depth anddimension, e.g., identifiablesyntactical patterns or rhetorical

tropes. Paragraphs must besequential, but no other conditionsapply (i.e., they may be any length).

Intro

further defines the pedagogical motives behind this project. Tufte writes,

In the summer of 1966, I conducted an experiment at the NDEA Institute at

the University of California, Los Angeles, asking forty-four college and highschool English teachers to jot down a half-dozen words or phrases they would

use to describe the style and tone of thirty sentences, the opening of TrumanCapote’s In Cold Blood. Their lists included 222 different adjectives, and therewas only one adjective that was used by as many as twelve of the teachers.These are some of the words they used: plain, elaborate, formal, informal,detailed, general, specific, objective, matter-of-fact, stylized, literary, poetic,

conversational, pedestrian, taut, over-drawn, visual, direct, lucid, dramatic, dispassionate, forceful,harsh, suspenseful, brisk, meditative, mysterious, polished, graceful, precise, blunt, symbolic, omniscient, prosaic,

conventional, unconventional, clear, crisp, cadenced, colorful, drab, graphic, photographic, concise, verbose, wordy, moving,uninvolved, detached, balanced, discerning, alliterative, well-developed, orderly, impressionistic, rhythmic, ominous, reportorial, natural,artificial, easy, pretentious, methodical, rambling, compact, vivid, thoughtful, imagistic, sensitive, incisive, clinical, chiseled, and sterile. (156)

Without preferring a monolithic framework for style, 3.33 Ways draws some of its

impetus from the problem of terminological fray suggested by Tufte’s experiment.That is, I want the writers and soon-to-be-teachers of writing who undertake thisproject to consider where their style vocabularies come from. Rhetorical tropes haveproven useful in this context for identifying and experimenting with stylistic tracings

among media, both conceptually and practically.

2. Style

Example - From The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pp. 138-139Of course the trickiest contradiction Whole Foods attempts to reconcile is the one

between the industrialization of the organic food industry of which it is a part and thepastoral ideals on which that industry has been built. The organic movement, as it was oncecalled, has come a remarkably long way in the last thirty years, to the point where i t now

looks considerably less like a movement than a bi g business. Lining the walls above thesumptuously stocked produce section in my Whole Foods are full-color photographs of localorganic farmers accompanied by text blocks setting forth their farming p hilosophies. Ahandful of these farms—Capay is one example—still sell their produce to Whole Foods, butmost are long gone from the p roduce bins, if not yet the walls. That's because Whole Foodsin recent years has adopted the grocery industry's standard regional distribution system,which makes supporting small farms impractical. Tremendous warehouses buy produce for

dozens of stores at a time, which forces them to deal exclusively with tremendous farms. Sowhile the posters still depict family farmers and their philosophies, the produce on sale

below them comes primarily from two big corporate organic growers in California,Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms, which together dominate the market for organicfresh produce in America. (Earthbound alone grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold inAmerica.)

As I tossed the plastic box of Earthbound prewashed spring mix salad into my WholeFoods cart, I realized that I was venturing deep into the belly of the industrial beast JoelSalatin had called "the organic empire." (Speaking of my salad mix, another small, beyond

organic farmer, a friend of Joel's, had told me he "wouldn't use that stuff to makecompost"--the organic purist's stock insult). But I'm not prepared to accept the premise thatindustrial organic is necessarily a bad thing, not if the goal is to reform a half-trillion-dollarfood system based on chain supermarkets and the consumer's expectations that food beconvenient and cheap.

And yet to the extent that the organic movement was conceived as a critique ofindustrial values, surely there comes a point when the process of i ndustrialization will costorganic its soul (to use a word still uttered by organic types without irony), when

Supermarket Pastoral becomes more fiction than fact: another lie told by marketers.

(138-139)

Here’s how the assignment builds, stepwise.

Near the end of this six-week project and after reading selections from Garr Reynolds’Presentation Zen, students deliver Ignite-style presentations to the class. These five-minute presentations introduce transformations of the three-paragraph passage.Students may include discussion of the passage’s context, the stylistic qualities ofthe passage, the remakes, and the decisions they made as they re-created the

passage three ways. Student-authored PowerPoint slideshows consisting of twentyslides each set to rotate automatically after 15 seconds accompany eachpresentation. Individual slides may not include more than five words. Slides shouldinclude images (i.e., these are visually intensive presentations, not text heavy slide-documents). Students may use up to five index cards; however, they are strongly

encouraged to present extemporaneously rather than reading from a script.

Access the assignment, schedule, and bibliography online at http://goo.gl/tWdHC

Closed captioned YouTube audio supplements are assembled at http://goo.gl/TQXWyFor more information or conversation about this work, please contact me [email protected].

What could the passage look like as a series of tweets? Guided by this question, I askstudents to notice how stylistic knowledge proliferates in Twitter. They remake the three-paragraph passage into a series of ten tweets making use of @-directed messages,

hyperlinks, and #hashtags. The remake is informed by existing experiments inTwitterature (i.e., literary works recast as tweets), although this slice of 3.33 Ways ismore akin to Twitterary nonfiction. Selected reading from Dom Sagolla’s 140 Characters:

A Style Guide for the Short Form (2009) supports this portion of the project.

Ex. RT @joelsalatin Whole Foods is the face of "the organic empire."

The three-panel imagetext triptych magnifies the

stylistic effects of photos+filters and words+typefaces. This remake takes shape after readingAnne Wysocki’s article “Awaywithwords” andwatching the 2007 documentary Helvetica. Weselect photos from Flickr Creative Commons

(which includes a mini-lesson on copyright) andcreate the triptych using image-editing andcollage tools available in Picnik.com.

A syntax analysis remake methodically breaks down the prose passage into individualsentences, then subjects the sentences to a blend of analytical treatments adaptedfrom Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method and Virginia Tufte’s “Short Sentences”

chapter in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (2006). The point of syntax analysis, inthis case, is to zero in on structural patterns that typically go unnoticed —patterns inpreposition usage and frequency, in verb forms, in the locations and complexity of

subjects, and in the lengths of sentences.

Ex. Para. 1, Sentence 6: Tremendous warehouses buy produce/ [for] dozens/ [of] stores/[at] a time,/ which forces them/ to deal exclusively/ [with] tremendous farms. (20 words)<Warehouses buy>Short sentence type: transitive (warehouses buy produce)

The web comic remake is informed by the firstchapter in Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (2006),“Writing with Pictures: Clarity, Persuasion and

Intensity,” in which he explains a delicate balancecomic creators must achieve between intensity andclarity. McCloud also identifies five choices integral to

communicating with comics: moment, frame, image,word, and flow (37). In addition, we find remaketechniques in Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story (2005), a comic-modeled variation on Queneau’sExercises in Style (1947/1981). Queneau’s “Oulipo

logic,” or invention by constraint underpins theremaking process enacted in the comic version of thepassage as well as the other three options.

Along with each remake, students develop a ±200-word comment that explicitly accountsfor their decisions, technical processes, and stylistic intensifications (or transformations).Remake notes should also name and explain the focal tropes suspended across this

design-minded integration of imagetext, filter, and typeface.

To produce the comic, students may combine photographs and word or thoughtbubbles using Comic Life (above). In recent semesters, some have also hand-drawncomics or used free, template-based platforms, such as Pixton.com and Bitstrips.com.

3. Remake

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Scan the QR code (left) with a smartphone or other web-ready mobile device to listen to a YouTube audio supplement.

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3.33 Ways: Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media