Bringing Pluralistic Style and Manipulation to the Composition Classroom
This chapter has asked you to consider what commonly eschewed avenues of style become available when one acknowledges that each choice of style and each act of rhetoric is one of manipulation and thus equally valid for ethical use. In conclusion, then, I offer three pluralistic and manipulative stylistic classroom activities that attempt to reintroduce composition students to a more complex notion of style, purpose, and exigence. In doing so I also, admittedly, argue for my own personal composition classroom exigencies: to teach students to be critical of their style and communication methods, to purposefully adapt to and control numerous audiences (whether that means to intrigue, disgust, incense, or hypnotize), and to enjoy experimentation in language.
Basic questions in a classroom of pluralistic styles:
• How do you want the audience to participate in the text?
• How does your audience want to participate in the text?
• What stylistic choices will mediate between these two desires?
1. The Found Object: Absorbed in Materiality
Style: Sublimity, Immediacy, and the Continuum of Attention
Goals: Learn to capture and focus an audience’s attention, create identification between author and reader, and present issues as in need of immediate action.
Activity: Many writing assignments ask students to make the assumption that the audience will have some knowledge of the writer and his or her exigence: a memo written for a boss, a speech delivered to the city council, an opinion column composed for the local newspaper. The found object assignment, however, asks students to design a message that must engage an unsuspecting audience with no assumed familiarity of the students or their exigences.
For instance, students might create a “shopdropped” item, a consumer good that is redesigned to subvert its original materiality.24 A shopdropper might buy a sugary children’s cereal, take it home, and use a computer program (or simply markers and paste) to redesign the packaging to highlight the cereal’s unhealthy content by the addition of images of rotting teeth and obese children. The shopdropper then places the box back on the shelf for the unsuspecting audience to encounter. Through visual interest and interactivity the object is designed to engross the audience in a type of participation similar to that of a confessional object, but rather than directing the audience’s critical eye at the construction of the item or the rhetor, it directs attention to the negative elements of the original product.
Thus, the goal of the found object assignment is to create a materially and stylistically engaging object (a dvd, sign, pop-up-book, comic, sticker, game) which will be found by a rhetorical audience, somehow gain their attention, and immediately absorb them in an understandable argument through interactivity.
Beyond wise object design, I ask students to come up with a hypothetical plan of distribution that explains where their object will be placed, how they will get the object there, what legal considerations might affect the placement of their object, and how the location of the object relates to the immediacy of the argument (arguments about nutrition are placed in the grocery store, arguments about fashion are attached to clothing racks, etc.).
Finally, I ask my students to explain the rhetorical choices they made in their object and placement designs: how ethos, pathos, and logos work in this object, how the context in which they place their object will affect their audience’s reception, how they designed their object to avoid misreadings, how they think their audience will respond and why.
The purpose of this activity is to prompt students to think critically about audience interaction and immersion in composition. It also asks them to consider how medium affects such immersion. Students must consider the benefits of one medium over another in terms of the exigence of the author, the point of attention, and the continuums of felt deception and agency. Finally, this assignment asks students to consider the ethical implications of surprising an unsuspecting audience, using public/private space, and redesigning/subverting someone else’s composition.
Further Question to Consider: When do audiences enjoy immersion in an artificial environment and when do they feel such immediacy is unethical? How does a sublime style occur outside of “creative” venues? How can a sublime author overcome a naturally critical audience?
2. Manipulate Your Teacher through Constructing Yourself
Style: Sprezzatura, Leaked Constructedness, and Apparent Mediation
Goals: Learn to control presentation of self, the subtle use of style, how to adapt to the opinions of an audience, and how materiality affects image of the author.
Activity: Many times in the composition classroom (including in my first activity) students are asked to suspend their belief and imagine that they are writing to a “real” rhetorical audience other than their teacher. This activity asks for just the opposite. In this activity I want my students to manipulate me and to do it without my knowledge.
In order to encourage a pluralistic notion of style, students must experiment with simultaneous rhetorical purposes and numerous selves surrounding those purposes. One of the biggest questions I want my students to ask in a style-as-manipulation environment is, “How do I want my audience to react to me?” An easy response like, “I want my audience to be convinced,” is not enough. Thus, in this activity, in addition to their original argument/purpose, I ask my students to choose from a list of (or come up with their own) odd sprezzaturic goals such as: make me think you’re cool; make me disgusted by your composition process; make me pity you; make me want to be a member of your family; make me think you’re pompous but lovable.
The more weirdly complex the achievement of the secondary ethos goal, the more fun my students have and the higher the grade they will receive. But, the subtle manipulation of attention towards the author is key here; if I realize where the student is trying to lead me, the effect won’t work as well. Thus, a student attempting the “disgusted by your composition process” prompt (and this is an extreme example), wouldn’t overtly describe the composition process but might spread just enough peanut butter on the edges of his or her pages for me to notice and be disgusted on the third page turn. A student attempting the “member of your family” prompt might include several subtle and specific familial metaphors or anecdotes, creating familial subtext.
I ask my students to write their sprezzaturic goal at the bottom of the last page so I can’t read it until I’ve finished the paper. If they’ve succeeded at manipulating my view of them, they generally will get a few extra points though I don’t punish them if they fail.
The purpose of this activity is the ambition that encircles sprezzatura, the manipulation of the audience through the presentation of self. It also imparts the idea that every stylistic choice (whether linguistic or material) affects an audience’s reception of message and perception of author. Ultimately, this activity attempts to push students beyond the idea that the best style hides the author.
Further Questions to Consider: How does a writer (especially a student writer) encourage an audience to analyze and take seriously the subtle use of language? When does authorial adaptation begin to alter an author’s original goals? When is it appropriate to reveal subjectivity and authorial presence (through sprezzatura or confession), and when is such a revealing distracting?
3. Making an Essay Confess Itself
Style: Confession, Hypermediation, and the Continuum of Felt Agency
Goals: Learn to encourage active participation and analysis
