St. Martin's Chapter 8

Justine Mack

Chapter 8 in St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing discusses how students need to find the connections between styles. Teaching style in your writing classes is to help students explore these relationships through writing. Style can be broken up into two separate categories. One is theoretical stylistics, which is focused on the nature and existence of style, “the application of stylistic criteria to literary studies and the linguistic attributes of difference styles,” (Glenn, 211). The other type of style is pedagogic stylistics, this deals with the problem of teaching students to recognize and develop styles in their own writing. Of the three theories described by Milic I agree with the dualistic theory when teaching style. The dualistic style argues that if we can’t tell a student that the struggle to find the best words to express the idea is the real struggle, then we can’t teach style period. Winston Weathers claims that the first step to teaching style is to stress the significance and relevance of style to the students. We must justify that style is a way to better communicate in writing and prove individuality in a piece.

I know I have seen the diagram by M.H. Abrams several times throughout my academic career. The center has the word work, which is supposed to connect to the chosen subject, artist, and audience. Choosing a specific audience for a piece is a major stylistic choice. Honestly, the audience to whom I write a paper for never really occurred to me until I got to college and the professors stressed how important this element can be. The major problem with audience is that it is not easily taught and over specification and under specification. When writing for a specific audience the writer must imagine themselves as the audience members taking into consideration all of the factors.

Language varieties and varying syntax were two writing elements that were stressed in my English classes in high school. The authors suggest that as a teacher you can tell your students to vary sentence length and structure but without giving examples of this it is difficult for a student to accomplish. Language practices are usually influenced by culture and region and can be found in writing as well. Just as you can see rhythm in certain speech patterns rhythm is also noticeable in writing at the level of syntax. Rhythm in writing can be defined by being influenced by the structure and length or sentences, word choice, and repetition. In high school I remember having a long in depth unit on syntax and that has influenced a lot of my writing.