STYLE

1. STYLE Making Rhetorical Arguments, Ch. 4

2. Variety Adding variety to your sentences is like inflecting your voice when you speak—it keeps your audience’s interest and prevents them from falling asleep. How can you add variety to your sentences? Vary the length of your sentences Vary tone (slightly! Big jumps in tone will alienate your readers) Vary sentence structure

3. Variety: Sentence Length Marvin Chester Stone was feeling thirsty. Winding down after a long day's work, he sipped a mint julep at his home off 9th Street in Washington, D.C. But something was getting in his way. More particularly, something was getting in his drink. It was an unwelcome reedy residue. It was his straw. His straw was shedding. This was the 1880s, when gentlemen sipped their whiskey through long tubes made of natural rye that lent a grassy flavor to whatever drink they plopped in. For many centuries, it was not uncommon for a sot to order a gin and tonic and wind up drinking a gin and tonic infused with natural grass flavors. Stone didn't have much patience when it came to non-mint plants floating around in his mint julep, and did something radical that billions of people around the world have appreciated in the 130 years since. He reinvented the straw. --Derek Thompson, “The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw,” Nov. 22, 2011 The Atlantic

4. Sentence combining The sun did not shine. It was wet. Too wet. We could not play. We sat. I was there. Sally was there. We were in the house. It was day. It was cold. We wished for something. We wanted to do something. Sally wore a dress. The dress was pink. The dress had polka dots. Sally is my sister. Sally sings.

5. Exercise Choose a paragraph from your paper that needs some work. Combine sentences and split sentences to make sure you have a variety of short and long sentences. Use short sentences to add emphasis where you need it.

6. Simile A comparison using the words like or as. Be careful with similes. A lot of them are cliché, overly informal, and only damage your ethos.

7. Analogy Analogies compare things where there are two or more points of comparison. “All animals are the same but different. Like a cake recipe passed down from generation to generation—with enhancements to the cake in each—the recipe that builds are bodies has been passed down, and modified, for eons. We may not look much like sea anemones and jellyfish, but the recipe that builds us is a more intricate version of the one that builds them.” (Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish, p. 115)

8. Exercise Write an analogy that you might be able to include in your final paper.

9. Metaphor A comparison that doesn’t use the words like or as. A is a B “My paper is a mutilated corpse.” (MRA, p. 143) A’s B “This paper’s mutilated corpse is not worth resuscitating.” (MRA, p. 143) B of an A “This mutilated corpse of a paper expired at the scene of the accident.” (MRA, p. 144)

10. Exercise Write a metaphor that you might be able to include in your final paper.

11. Titles • What should a title do? • Introduce the subject of the paper • Grab the reader’s interest

12. Titles Which of these papers do you want to read most? The Crusades Political Motives and the Crusades The Crusades as a Force in European Unity: Preventing Internal Political and Theological Division through External Distraction

13. More effective titles From research essays: It’s Not Your Grandfather’s Media: Why the Fairness Doctrine Should Not Be Brought Back Intelligent Omission: Recognizing the Necessary Absence of ID in the Classroom From magazine articles: Marry Him!: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (The Atlantic March 2008) The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw (The Atlantic November 2011) Is It Wrong to Feed Pink Slime to Our Children in School Lunches? (The Atlantic April 2012)

14. Exercise Write a title for your paper that both grabs your readers’ attention and indicates the controversy of your paper.

15. Conclusions • Start with your main point • Summarize or restate your most important points but don’t repeat them word for word. • Add a New Significance or Application • Drive home why your readers should care. • Call for More Research • Consider where the discussion should go from here. --The Craft of Research, pp. 244-245

16. Example Conclusion But first an introduction: “At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” “It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, thereby inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry.” --Adam Gopnik, “The Dragon’s Egg: High Fantasy for Young Adults,” The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2011

17. Example Conclusion “One might mock—one does mock—the mastery of what is, after all, mere mock history. But the fantasy readers’ learned habit of thinking historically is an acquisition as profound in its way as the old novelistic training in thinking about life as a series of moral lessons. Becoming an adult means learning a huge body of lore as much as it means learning to know right from wrong. We mostly learn that lore in the form of conventions: how you hold the knife, where you put it, that John was the witty Beatle, Paul the winning one, that the North once fought the South. Learning in symbolic form that the past can be mastered is as important as learning in dramatic form that your choices resonate; being brought up to speed is as important as being brought up to grade. Fantasy fiction tells you that history is available, that the past counts. As the boring old professor knew, the backstory is the biggest one of all. That’s why he was scribbling old words on the blackboard, if only for his eyes alone.” --Adam Gopnik, “The Dragon’s Egg: High Fantasy for Young Adults,” The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2011

18. Example Conclusion “While a completely unified public may be a fiction, while universal, ultimate success in social matters is a false hope, at least more and more healthy manifestations of the public can be a part of the reality forever in the making. “The upshot of this view is that “the public” may not be as fractured as some believe, or, better, it will not be as fractured as some believe if the public continues to forge a fruitful discourse and manifest better versions of itself. Both Burke and Dewey say that language can be used to create a fabric that unites people through shared understandings and pursuits. Dewey calls this project “the energetic, unflagging, unceasing creation of an ever present new road upon which we can walk together” (134). The project of the current generation is to find a language that will fruitfully engage the specific problems at hand. Success may only come in small steps, but those steps are enough to begin sharing the words that ameliorate our interconnected world. --Paul Stob, “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public”

19. Exercise Write a new conclusion for your paper that ties your argument together and provides the reader with something new (a new insight, direction for research, question to chew on, etc.).

20. Absolutes A type of free modifier that has no verb. “Verene and Curtler both propose changes to the university curriculum, Verene suggesting core texts and individual canons, Curtler a more regulated and programmatic curriculum of cluster courses.” (MRA, p. 137)