A Return to the Rhetoric of the Sentence

Gunner, Jeanne. “A Return to the Rhetoric of the Sentence.” Santa Clara University. N.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/pt/gunner.htm

A Return to the Rhetoric of the Sentence

By Jeanne Gunner

Santa Clara University

To be fluent writers of rhetorically effective sentences: that is my goal for students in my writing classes. Correctness is a subset of fluency, and so we begin with the rhetoric of the sentence, letting grammatical error take care of itself, as much as it needs to (as Joe Williams’s “The Phenomenology of Error” shows us). A grammatically correct sentence that fails to invoke an audience, create a voice, and focus on its subject is still a problem sentence. But rather than continuing the grammar-style controversy, I’d like to “cut to the pedagogical chase” and outline a particular classroom approach to the rhetoric of the sentence.

When I first began working with basic writers, I saw the immense potential and energy so many brought to their writing and, like many basic writing instructors, was at a loss to explain the barely adequate results. And identifying the successes—actually naming their causes, the things successful writers did on the page—seemed beyond me; rhetorical theory seemed too broad and grammar and usage rules too narrow to account for what “worked.” My students were intelligent and motivated—cognitive studies seemed always off the mark in explaining these students—but despite their good ideas they wrote logically compressed or simplistic essays. They revised, but the revisions earned them little more than a plus appended to the original grade, a frustrating experience for all of us. Naming what they did not do was not helping—not enough development, not enough support, not enough attention to grammatical correctness led to not enough improvement, not enough understanding of how to improve, of what to do to make their work better. I wanted to know how to identify for them the techniques of effective academic prose. And, like many, I turned to Mina Shaughnessy, to Errors and Expectations. Her book, grounded as it is in basic techniques of writing, became the starting point in a naming project, and to it I added Frances Christensen’s generative sentence model. But I also turned to rhetoricians of the sentence—to Richard Graves, Winston Weathers, and, most usefully, to Richard A. Lanham, in Analyzing Prose. The how met the why: the syntactic knowledge of basic writing combined with the purposes of rhetorical study.

Adapting a set of simple concepts and a vocabulary from these sources, I worked with my students to find the means to displace the linear, inelegant, unfocused sentences that tangled their ideas and deadened their voices. Rather than attempting to teach adult users of the language from the grammar level up, I asked them to develop an academic style by learning new ways of forming written sentences. Fluent writers bring to composing a few fundamental techniques: the ability to 1) vary syntactic patterns; 2) use the range of punctuation English offers; and 3) build in emphasis to call attention to main ideas. Certainly other rhetorical techniques are important, including basic document design features such as the simple enumeration I just employed. But these three principles seem to enable to students to develop quickly significant rhetorical sophistication at the sentence level, and so they form the sentence curriculum in every writing class I teach.

We begin with syntactic variation, the ability to create focus and voice at the sentence level by adding modification and varying its placement in the sentence. We need a few technical phrases for a shared vocabulary; the techniques matter more than the technical phrases, however, for the grammatical knowledge is tacit, but the rhetorical effect must be consciously constructed.

Base sentence/S - V: Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography.

Note that basic sentences are linear: the subject follows the verb, often the dominant syntactic pattern in student writing (and a stylistic analysis of a sample of their own writing can be useful for students: counting the number of sentences that open with the basic S-V patterns is a good starting point). As linear structures, such sentences simply report information, and no real voice enters in.

Single-word modifier: Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing autobiography.

A voice enters with the modifier: some intelligence must be at work to name the autobiography’s nature. The sentence is rhetorically inflected—it has a focus and a voice through this simple addition.

Double: Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography.

Doubling the modification lets a writer call attention to voice and add/refine information in a focused way—the expanded modification attaches to the main point instead of being appended at the end, as happens in a linear style, as in “Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography. It is revealing and also painful.” A writer will have a hard time finding a way to get back to characterizing the autobiography or explaining how it is revealing and why that matters; the linear style allows the writer to pick up the last point only, leaving the earlier ideas undeveloped, compressed. And then the process starts all over again: “It is painful because we learn that he was poor.” The writer then follows up on the idea of poverty, further moving away from a critical reading of the autobiography and toward simple retelling. Students often intensify the linear effect by adding on a new clause with “that” or “which” as a way to sound less “basic.” To write a three to five page essay in a linear style is a gargantuan task: each new sentence must be a new idea. And yet all this thinking still produces an ineffective result, since no idea remains as a central focus, and no argument can logically develop. But working from a single idea and then modifying it keeps the focus on that idea and lets the writer refine it, add ideas about it, without moving away from it. Depth of thought and structure supplant the accretions and so degenerating focus of a linear style.

Vary placement: Revealing and painful, Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography.

Bootstraps, revealing and painful, is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography.

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography, revealing and painful.

Each shift in placement directs the reader’s attention in a new way. In the first version, the modifiers contextualize the information to come; readers thus read with the writer’s intended interpretive frame. In the second, the subject and verb are broken up by the writer’s interpretive frame, placing attention on the writer’s viewpoint. In the final version, the reader is left with the writer’s judgment at the sentence’s end. In all, the writer’s voice and view dominate, creating an authoritative presence in the prose. A writer who can vary syntax has a choice of structure, and making choices is rhetorical—the writer chooses according to the intended effect on an audience.

The same technique applies with other, more complex forms of modification. Such forms help students keep their ideas focused without sacrificing complexity, and may even encourage increased complexity of thought:

Participial phrase (-ing or -ed added to a verb):

Double:

Vary placement:

Bootstraps, the story of a Puerto Rican academic and an indictment of his social exclusion, is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography.

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography, the story of a Puerto Rican academic and his indictment of social exclusion.

Complex thought requires embedding and logical coding if we are to enable readers to follow the complexity. Semicolons, colons, dashes, and parentheses are kinds of logical codes: in and of themselves they tell readers how to connect ideas. Because they use the language, students tacitly understand what they are to do in the following exercise:

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography.

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography; ____________________.

(Add an idea that refines/explains the point: it tells of his difficult rise from poverty and his struggle to assimilate)

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography: ____________________.

(Add an idea that provides a logical cause for the claim: we follow his difficult rise from poverty and his struggle to assimilate)

Bootstraps--____________________--is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography.

(Interrupt the base sentence to highlight the point: a story of poverty and attempted assimilation)

Bootstraps (____________________) is Victor Villanueva’s revealing and painful autobiography.

(Add background context or authorial aside: a personal memoir but also academic argument)

Each punctuation form logically signals to readers how to relate ideas in a sentence. For writers, they open up in each case recursive or embedded space for further thought about the main point, giving writers non-linear ways to add ideas and still maintain focus. By naming the logic of each punctuation form, we provide students with sophisticated means of connecting ideas—with choices, not rules, about forming sentences.

Finally, we cover the techniques of embedded and recursive structures. Students can repeat syntactic structures—they can easily produce parallelism:

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography, his story of poverty and racism.

We see how poverty restricts him and how racism oppresses him.

He argues that language is race; Spanish is color.

Adding varied modification, doubling it, and using punctuation rhetorically all tend to produce recursive, not linear, structures. We can also use emphatic repetition to highlight and refine a major idea, indicating to our readers what the focal point is:

Bootstraps is Victor Villanueva’s autobiography, a story of poverty and racism, his personal recounting of the difficult effort to assimilate.

The main point—what Bootstraps is and does—is named five times: Bootstraps/autobiography/story of poverty/story of racism/recounting of effort to assimilate. Each added element refines the point, creating not redundancy but emphasis, detail, development.

This approach might at first seem to be primarily imitative. But I’d argue that it is generative instead: it provides structural and rhetorical elements that students can combine in endless variation to create their own voices and styles in different writing situations.

Reproduced here, grammar errors and stylistic lapses intact, are the opening and ending paragraphs from two essays written by one student in my Composition & Rhetoric I course this past quarter. In the three weeks between the two essays’ due dates, we covered the rhetorical techniques of syntactic variation, rhetorical punctuation use, and emphasis (along with other rhetorical issues related to organization).

From Essay 1 (a rhetorical and ideological analysis of an image, theme, or scene in James Dickey’s Deliverance):

[opening paragraph] King, ruler, dictator what do these nouns have in common? They all represent a form of holistic power and authority. In James Dickey’s Deliverance, the men for the most part are depicted in this manner. Dickey also incorporates the following characteristics to create an image of the “true man,” having masculine features, being strong and courageous, as well as having an authoritative stance. On the other hand, Dickey portrays Bobby as having, “smooth thin hair and high pink complexion” (Dickey 5). These characteristics, compared to the depiction of the other men qualify as feminine and throughout the novel are delineated as weak, powerless, and submissive. Therefore, insinuating that in James Dickey’s Deliverance, the power of the male is strengthened through the domination of the female.

[ending paragraph] After much thought and consideration there is a lot of discrepancy about this argument regarding the power of the male becoming stronger by the domination of the female. A sub topic with this argument illustrated in the context of the novel is that of deliverance. This, implies that it is the male whom literally and figuratively brings a child into this world erasing all the maternal qualities a female has. Unfortunately, after a reader finishes reading James Dickey’s Deliverance the reader becomes aware that Dickey agrees with this notion and reiterates it constantly throughout the novel through explicit and detailed examples emphasizing his point . . . .

From Essay 2 (an analysis of the material effects of rhetoric in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly):

[opening paragraph] “Yes, master,” is a common phrase associated with “master” and “slave”—reflecting a relation of domination and oppression. In David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, we see a similar social process: one person dominates another, creating an apparent master/slave relation. In the play, Rene Gallimard, the Westerner, is portrayed as an individual who enjoys power—the dominator; Butterfly, Gallimard’s love interest, is the oppressed. Through twenty years of oppression, Butterfly always appeared to be weak, docile, and submissive, but actually learns how to resist Gallimard using his own tactics: race, gender, and mistreatment. But in any struggle for power, both parties are corrupted: the oppressed can resist oppression, but the result is a shift from oppressed to oppressor role. Song pretends to be Butterfly as a way to resist Gallimard’s racist attempt to dominate him, but ends up as corrupt as he is.

[ending paragraph] M. Butterfly is a very complicated play, a disjointed text that does not portray events in chronological order. In addition, Hwang uses many intertextual story lines. This argument—that the oppressed can resist the oppressor—mixes innocence and guilt in a process of cruel deception. Song utilizes Gallimard’s innocence as well as Butterfly’s love to his advantage and leads Gallimard to become the one who is oppressed—and eventually to his death. Hence, Song is the ultimate oppressor, but simultaneously his victory is not honorable and noteworthy, because through his victory, he becomes corrupt—he becomes another Gallimard.

This student retains his voice from the first essay—note the similar opening move in the second—but he has gained increased control over sentence boundaries, focus, and varied and emphatic constructions. He worked on his writing with real commitment, in part, I believe, because he saw progress of a meaningful order, not in grammatical correctness, but in enhanced credibility and authority. He gained a sense of agency and authenticity as a result of his increasing rhetorical knowledge, reflected at the whole-essay level as a result of enhanced sentence-level rhetorical ability.

If you go back and reread this essay, you will see that almost every sentence in it embodies the techniques of recursive style, rhetorical punctuation, and varied syntax. Pick up an academic journal and you’ll see the same techniques used in a multiplicity of ways and effects (I tested this claim by picking up the top of the stack of journals on my desk and opening to the first article; check out Lizabeth A. Rand’s opening paragraph in the February 2001 CCC). These are the common techniques of academic discourse, the rhetorical means we use to create authoritative voices and coherent ideas. Correct grammar is a common by-product, but, as Williams’s classic piece shows, we pay little attention to correctness when we’re engaged with a writer’s ideas. That’s what I hope for from my students’ sentences.