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СКАЧАТЬ sentences, brief passages—with transitions, and do so within the student’s rhetorical purpose (e.g., on specific class assignments). Instead of the instructor making corrective comments in the margin to indicate where improvement is needed, this kind of pedagogy would enable students to strengthen the building blocks of discourse—and to do so in a way that emphasizes invention. In other words, this type of approach would allow the student to build a repertoire of cognitive structures and rhetorical strategies while simultaneously requiring her to build and articulate conceptual linkages between juxtaposed linguistic units—between phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and larger passages. At the level of assignments and class activities, the emphasis would be on imitation of small discursive units—figures as outlined in Vinsauf’s Documentum.

      In order to determine a strategy for building such a pedagogy, I gave a brief informal assignment to my Business Communication class, asking my students to take three consecutive sentences from their drafts and recast them using three different figures of thought. (See Fig. 1.) In providing the examples of the various “figures of thought,” I selected those that seemed most pertinent to the assignment at hand, which I explained to them. For example, because “character development” is not used in business writing, I have omitted it on the handout. Indeed, business writing has its own set of stylistic expectations. The same is true of science writing, as Jonathan Buell points out in his article (in this volume) entitled “Style and the Professional Writing Curriculum: Teaching Stylistic Fluency through Science Writing.” Once I selected the figures that would work best for professional writing, I then asked the students to be sure to include transitions between the newly revised sentences. Of course, we had been discussing transitions in various contexts throughout the term, but mostly during the individual conferences I hold with students at least twice during our 11-week term (between the first and final drafts of writing assignments 1 and 2).

      My goals for this assignment, in terms of seeing how successful stylistic imitation would be for my students’ writing, were very basic: essentially, I wanted to know if they could do it, and what sort of changes it would make to their drafts. My rationale for having them use this assignment on an initial draft was to open up the possibility that it would help move them back into “invention” as they revised, helping them revise more substantially. As a follow-up, I wanted to get their opinions on how the assignment worked for them, so I included a couple of questions on it in the teaching evaluation form I give my students at the end of the term. Surprisingly, the students thought that this was a difficult assignment, and, even more surprising, they thought that having this information at the beginning of the paper cycle—during the early stages of drafting—would be most helpful. More than half went on to say that they could see this being useful if it were integrated into the course from the first day of class, as it would help them organize their thoughts more effectively.

      In future courses, I plan to take my students’ suggestions, but I also want to more fully implement the meta-rhetorical potential suggested by Vinsauf’s treatises within the course structure itself. For example, I not only plan to have students work on stylistic imitation and figures of thought from the beginning, as I’ve already said, but I also want the assignments themselves to “build off of” each other. By this, I mean that the students will select broad topics for which they can write perhaps a business letter and a formal report, thus enacting a kind of conceptual transition that will require them to link mental spaces in what Fauconnier would call “blends.” Their writing assignments will thus “transition” from one to the other in much the same way as their sentences and paragraphs will.

      Perhaps even more importantly, I plan on having them engage in a self-reflexive move, requiring them to become more aware of their own rhetorical, stylistic choices—by having them perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work—including an analysis of how and the degree to which their use of figures and of various factors associated with style effectively convey the content of the message. By doing this, of course, they will enact the same dynamic they engage in when they must become aware of their own conceptual links in their construction of transitions between sentences and paragraphs. By performing this self-reflexive assignment and then having them re-write the paper they have analyzed, they will also be moving from style to invention.

      Interestingly, in outlining some of my ideas here, I too have moved from style to invention. Of course, teaching itself is a rhetorical activity—even an argument, perhaps—one that we make to our students about what sorts of things are important about writing and how they execute different pieces of writing in different rhetorical contexts. It is also an ongoing argument we engage in with ourselves, as we revise and re-think our positions on what and how we should teach—an argument I’ve entered meta-rhetorically in this chapter that suggests the value of stylistic imitation, the significance of transitions, the lessons we can take and shape from the Middle Ages, the ways in which an emphasis on transitions is consistent with cognitive psychology, and how we undertake the act of writing, both in the papers our students write and in the classrooms we work so hard to compose and revise.

      References

      Corbett, E. P. J. & Connors, R. J. (1999). Classical rhetoric for the modern student. New York: Oxford University Press.

      Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge.

      Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books.

      Fish, S. (2005, May 31). Devoid of content. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html

      Geist, U. (1996). Imitation as a tool in writing pedagogy. In Rijlaarsdam, G., van den Bergh, H., & Couzjin, M. (Eds.), Effective teaching and learning of writing: Current Trends in research (pp. 51-60). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

      Geist, U. (2005). Stylistic imitation as a tool in writing pedagogy. In Riklaarsdam, G., Bergh, H., Couzjin, M. (Eds.) Effective Learning and Teaching of Writing: A handbook of writing education (pp. 169-180). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

      Geoffrey of Vinsauf. (1967). Poetria nova. (Nims, M. F., Trans.). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

      Geoffrey of Vinsauf (1968). Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (Parr, R. P., Ed.). Marquette, WI: Marquette University Press.

      Hodges, J. C., Horner, W. B., Strobeck Webb, S., & Miller, R. K. (1998). Harbrace college handbook (13th ed.). Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

      Micciche, L. R. (2004). Making a case for rhetorical grammar. College Composition and Communication 55(4), 716-737.

      Noguchi, R. R. (1991). Grammar and the teaching of writing: Limits and possibilities. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

      Novak, J. D. & Cañas, A. J. (2008). The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them. Pensacola, FL: Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

      Pullman, G. (1999). Stepping yet again into the same current. In Kent, T. (Ed.), Post-process theory: Beyond the writing process paradigm (pp. 16-29). Carbondale: Southern Illinois.

      The Oxford English Dictionary. (2004). (V3.1 CD-ROM). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      Sommers, N. (1988). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. In G. Tate & E. P. J. Corbett (Eds.), The writing teacher’s sourcebook (2nd ed.) (pp. 119-27). New York: Oxford University Press.

      Woods, M. C. (2001). The teaching of poetic composition in the later middle ages. In J. J. Murphy (Ed.), A short history of writing instruction: From ancient Greece to modern America (2nd ed.) (pp. 123-143). Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press.

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