Citation

Garza, Edward Santos. “Style Makes the Writer: Expanding Considerations of Style in the Writing Center .” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Squarespace , www.praxisuwc.com/ edward-santos-garza-143.

Summary

In “Style Makes the Writer: Expanding Considerations of Style in the Writing Center,” Edward Santos Garza argues for the emphasis that should be placed on style in student writing, specifically by university writing centers. Garza begins by recounting the first public university he worked for, and its partnership with the campus’s Law Center to create a writing assessment assignment for incoming freshman in the form of a required prompt that asked students, Should lawyers be required to work pro-bono hours every year? Assessed via a fairly strict rubric that focused on how well students supported their opinions, developed clear thesis stances, and constructed overall sentence flow, the assignment ultimately determined who required writing center assistance and further writing tutorage. Looking back on this rubric, Garza claims that there could have been significant and worthwhile changes, such as attention and grading weight towards style. He writes that “an effective writing style heightens the quality of everything else in a text,” and goes on throughout the article to cite specific examples in which this is the case.

Before this, however, Garza defines style through the scholar Paul Butler’s definition: “the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning.” This deployment includes habitual patterns and conscious choices at the sentence and word level that inevitably come together to define a student’s particular “organic” style. Though he admits that writing centers today are not totally dismissive of foregrounding style in student writing, there is nevertheless a need to more fully integrate it into overall assessment, and that in many cases style has been marginalized in favor for an emphasis towards organization or proper grammar usage. Garza even argues that many students come into writing centers wanting to understand how to better develop their unique writing styles, but that the way in which they word this request can sometimes be misunderstood or altogether ignored.

One example of style that is highlighted: the case of Tax Fortgang, a Princeton student turned viral sensation after writing an essay entitled, “Check Your Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege.” Fortgang lays out a conservative argument that is later picked up by national TV outlets, and Garza, not quite understanding the mass appeal of the otherwise straw-man heavy argument, investigates. He finds that, more than anything else, Fortgang’s particular style, which possesses an immediate confidence and utilizes extreme language to summarize the claims of others that he attacks, is ultimately what is so memorable about the essay. Focusing on style in this example, especially in the hypothetical scenario of Fortgang coming into a writing center and asking for assistance, would allow for a better understanding of how Forgang’s overall argument is weakened, logically, by the kind of stylized, extreme language that he employs.

Another example that Garza uses is that of SparkNotes and Thug Notes both summarizing/analyzing The Great Gatsby. His own students overwhelmingly preferred the style that Thug Notes draws on, and explains how more than anything else style can be used in the service of making something more interesting. This in turn leads to greater engagement, and Garza ends his article by rephrasing Andrew Lunsford’s held belief that the audiences of today and tomorrow will almost certainly dismiss you if your style is not engaging or effective. Though audiences have realistically always been this way, style and content now need each other more than ever, and erudition is not enough.

Quotes

“I reflect on this experience because it shows the value of reading holistically, of seeing writing as a creation unique to each person who practices it. If I still coordinated that partnership, I would focus on what unifying force could anchor my reading of the samples. At the time, my fellow scorer would tell me that, within a sample’s first few paragraphs, he simply knew whether it would be “good” or not. As non-presumptuous as I tried to be, I agreed with him, though I was not sure why.”

“An effective writing style heightens the quality of everything else in a text. For one, it can announce a writer’s purpose especially clearly. A style with more elaborative qualities—e.g., well-used subordinate clauses, qualifying words, a variety of sentence lengths—covers what rubrics such as the one above might call “development.” Moreover, whereas many rubrics treat grammar as something that is either “correct” or not, an effective style reflects how grammar can be rhetorical, how it can be manipulated to emphasize whatever the writer chooses. When properly attended to, style is both the result of and canvas for clear thought.”

“The likely reality is that we sometimes communicate in our own “organic” styles, while at other times we contrive separate styles for other audiences. To a Latinx such as me, it is no surprise that a lack of thoughtfulness on this point has coincided with a lack of non-white, non-male scholars in stylistic studies, thinkers who have plenty of experience constructing styles for audiences different than themselves.”

“Indeed, if given the chance to unsettle how writing at the WC is read, evaluated, and discussed, style can have a liberating effect on tutors and writers alike. It could help enact what many WCs only pay lip service to, that those who visit their spaces truly are Writers, not just students fulfilling the guidelines of their assignments. Style can enrich tutors’ jobs by keying them in to their own habits when responding to texts, habits that can be prescriptive and mechanical.”

“As always, though, style in the WC must still take into account who—the writer or tutor—gets to set a consultation’s agenda. “What good is a style-centric pedagogy,” someone might say, “if writers rarely visit to talk about style?” To this I argue that writers do in fact come to the WC to talk about their writing styles, their deployment of rhetorical resources; they just express this interest via other terms. Tutors are accustomed to writers coming in to discuss how well their essays “flow,” whether they “sound good.” These writers are really talking about style.”

“Such an expansion would provide a rich avenue for addressing challenges WCs have always faced: helping writers navigate genre, helping writers take ownership of their work, and helping writers find themselves amid the ocean of academic discourse.”

Reflection

I’ve always felt that, throughout my time as a writing student, there was very little room for understanding and growth in personal style. A kind of formulaic style naturally grows from the repeated rubric requirements of conventional K-12 writing classes, and more often than not this continues on well into college level English 101. Even my students, now, expect a routine emphasis towards grammar and punctuation, appropriate structuring of ideas, and mechanical order in their writing. What I appreciate about the curriculum that we’re working with is that there is room to slightly bypass these expectations, and instead focus in on something like personal writing style. Since this is mostly an entirely new opportunity for growth in my student’s writing careers, there’s a bit of hesitance that comes along with the transition. The expectations have shifted, and they see that they can, perhaps for the first time, really be free from the kind of restraints they’ve associated with “writing” until now.

Garza helpfully positions his advocating for style within the realm of writing centers in universities, and this isn’t too far off from what we’re doing in our English 101 classrooms. We’re still acting as personal tutors for each piece of writing that we receive, and outside of rubric requirement feedback that we give is the liberty to delve into aspects of style. I’m able to, for example, point to students’ narratorial voice and subsequent control of narration as a unique aspect to their style of writing, and I’ve received comments afterwards that have pointed out this assessment as unfamiliar but extremely helpful; that though they definitely appreciate assessment on grammar and structure, the simple act of shifting focus towards unique stylistic elements helps them understand the kind of frequency in which they write. I’ve been told more than once this quarter that past instructors have always made surface level construction of sentences the center of attention in their writing feedback, and that this made writing for my students an almost mathematical process, or a short-term problem to solve. For my own pedagogical research, I’m very invested in the idea of utilizing style in the classroom; I think it would be tremendously useful to implement an assignment that is given to students twice: once assessed entirely on style and the deployment of  that style, and another time in which assessment is focused on a more standard rubric. Which is assigned first could potentially determine a lot, but the results would nevertheless be useful.

Garza very much makes interesting writing the main priority, and why wouldn’t he? As technically sound as student writing can get, interesting writing is what inevitably holds attention. This is especially true outside the academic training environment that these students have been in for most of their lives, and so I wholeheartedly agree with Garza that it’s essentially troubling to not place major emphasis on the development and comprehension of individual style.