Glossary

[rlunday]

It just occurred to me that we could use a style glossary. Sure, we
have lots of them -- in textbooks and online; but maybe we can help
ourselves by building our own, partly from other sources, partly from
our own authority.

Here's a starter list; let's make the basic list first, then I can
work (with anyone's help) on definitions and examples.

*

style
voice
tone
coherence
cohesion
unity
emphasis
balance
parallelism
...

...and besides "style," what else do we talk about when we talk about
writing? Grammar; what words help students see how to write well?
Besides "do" and "don't," that is. I talk about "fluency," for
example; and "standard" vs. "nonstandard," which can seem like a cop-
out -- but not when I relate it to levels of formality (also called
"style" in a somewhat different sense), audience, purpose, persona or
ethos, etc.

What words do you find yourself using when you talk to students about
their writing?

[ivy]

On Nov 12, 11:51 am, rlunday <robertlun...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It just occurred to me that we could use a style glossary. Sure, we
> have lots of them -- in textbooks and online; but maybe we can help
> ourselves by building our own, partly from other sources, partly from
> our own authority.
>
> Here's a starter list; let's make the basic list first, then I can
> work (with anyone's help) on definitions and examples.
>
> *

Style: When I think of style I think of the Writer’s inner voice – we
don’t use that term anymore it was very 60’s and 70’s but we still use
the idea, as in, “What is it about your writing that sets it apart
from everyone else’s? We use the same basic tools now, computer,
paper, or electronic medium, and language (words). I read recently,
probably on the Google group, that we, as instructors or tutors, tend
to have in mind an “ideal” essay, when we begin with a student.
Then, we compare the student’s work to that – it is very easy to fall
into the habit of changing, or influencing what the student’s words or
meaning are and to write the essay over in our own image, so to
speak. As Writing Consultants, then, our goal becomes to let the
student say what they want to say and stop trying to make their words
conform to the “ideal” we have in our head. It is very easy as tutors
to slide into this trap – we know what the student should say but we
have to let them find their own way.

Voice: I think of this as the same thing as style. Maybe the
difference is what we try to leave the student with at the end. We
have to let the student ride the bike without the training wheels. We
tutors are the training wheels. They will fall down at first, but in
the end they will learn to ride by themselves.

Tone: I think this has more to do with creative writing than essay
writing – for example, great Romantic writers, like Poe and Hawthorne,
set a very definite tone in their writings, the mood is somber, the
characters are usually suffering, any story by Poe could be used to
illustrate this concept to students. Tone would be something we teach
our students to evaluate or understand. Essays don’t exactly have
tone, they have information, just the facts, and as tutors our job
would be to teach students how to evaluate a writer’s use of tone for
the purpose of critique or analysis.

Coherence: good topic – when we look for coherence in writing we are
looking for our Westernized concept of it – having recently read the
essay by Fan Shen in recent posts, I am reminded of the tendency we
tutors have of trying to force our students to conform to our Western
idea of coherence. On the other hand, this seems to be the only
alternative in this particular environment, i.e., College in the
United States, for our students need to conform to a set of external
constraints imposed by HCC, that is, to learn to write in Formal
English. This is a skill necessary to succeed in academia, and to a
certain extent, and in the American business world (depending on the
job, not as much in Sciences and Technology fields). To wit, our
Western conception of coherence means a definite order, where the
writer does not encourage the reader to take his own path to
discovery. Rather, we, as writers, must bring the reader along on our
purposeful, albeit biased, adventure, from thesis to conclusion,
without letting the reader veer from our intended path. In my
opinion, much of Western writing is propaganda, its intention is
“educating” the reader, or audience, in the proper vein.

Cohesion: Again the Westernized definition would be at work here.
Cohesion would seem to imply that we, as tutors, make sure our
student’s arguments are logical and follow in logical order, again to
keep the reader from mentally wandering astray.
Unity: what would unity be? This is a tricky one – in a painting,
unity would be elements that tie the entire work together. Maybe in
an essay, unity is a single idea – perhaps the thesis statement
itself, maybe all the ideas of the essay have to relate back to this
single idea. Each concept covered in each paragraph somehow has to
connect logically to the paragraph before, leading the reader, from a
to b to c and finally, to the conclusion, in the manner intended by
the author of the paper.

Emphasis: this might be the focal point. I’m again assuming we are
looking at Writing as another artform that has certain basic
commonalities with other two-or-three dimensional artforms, such as
painting or sculpture. In this case, “emphasis” in an essay or
research paper, might be that part of the work that the writer
especially wants the audience to remember after they finish reading
it. I think this could also be called the main point, the main
argument, or the main premise, with its logical conclusion.

Balance: when I think of balance, I definitely think of a visual
example, and ask myself the following question. Do all parts of the
picture have elements that play off one another and help to make the
entire piece coherent? So I assume, when relating to writing, it
would be a small logical leap to posit that an essay, or a paper has
to have balance, that is, an Intro, three (or more) body paragraphs,
and a Conclusion that all support and complement one another, in a
logical, coherent, cohesive way. That is, one that forces the reader
along the path one intends. Just as in a Western-style painting,
where there is a single center of interest or focal point on which you
want a viewer to examine for a longer period of time than other
sections, in an essay, the writer might intend for the reader to
easily see the focus or main ideas of the essay and spend the most
time and mental energy there. Just a thought…

Parallelism: this is good topic – teaching writing students how to
recognize a sentence with parallel structure and how to form one, for
example, the first part of the sentence is written in the same format
as the second part of the sentence: definitely need a written example
here to illustrate the point…


Symbols – (my suggestion) In literature (as in painting) we have many
visual symbols such as flowers, ravens, water, these visual (or
written) elements are used to revealed underlying or hidden messages.
For example, if we were to see a raven in the story, we would know it
foreshadows the death of someone.