ENGL 4120: Syllabus (SP24)

Writing 

style 

with 

engl 4120 

spring 2024 

slustyle.tumblr.com 

mwf: 12 00 -12 50 

dr. nathaniel a. rivers 

nathaniel.rivers@slu.edu 

office hours: mw 1 00 -2 30 

Course Introduction 

This course is about style, how we analyze it, how we cultivate it. Our goal in this course is to expand 

our stylistic repertoires. We will do this by digging into sentences—clauses, phrases, words, and 

punctuation—to see how even the smallest units of writing can persuade. We’ll begin with some 

grammar review, not to ensure “correctness” (a word whose meaning and effects we will closely 

examine), but rather to understand the way sentences work rhetorically. Far from being the stuffy 

domain of reactionary pedants, grammar is historically related to practices of magic (hence the 

etymological relation between “grammar” and “glamor”). As is appropriate for magicians, we will 

learn an esoteric language—figures and tropes such as parataxis, hypotaxis, syntaxis, diacope, 

epistrophe, apostrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, and many more. And like magicians, we’ll spend 

much of our time practicing, experimenting—looking at your writing, trying on different styles through 

repetition and imitation. Here is what I hope for you by the end of this course: 

1. That you appreciate the difference between prescriptive and descriptive accounts of language. 

2. That you discern how different situations call for different styles. 

3. That you deploy grammatical and stylistic vocabulary with confidence and accuracy. 

4. That you cultivate a rhetorically sophisticated repertoire of styles. 

5. That you enjoy written style: that working with words gives you pleasure and delight. 

Course Elements 

The course consists of a commonplace book, several short exercises, three major assignments, and a 

portfolio that will include revisions and an explanatory letter. I will ask you to keep copies of all these 

assignments in Google Drive folders so that you can access them all at the end of the course. There is 

also a brief final exam on the terminology that we’ll be learning throughout the course. N.B.: the 

descriptions I provide here of the major assignments are only sketches. As we approach the major 

assignments, we will read examples of the genres, describe them, and apply those descriptions to 

your own writing. 

Commonplace Book 

Emerging in Early Modern Europe, commonplace books were privately made and held collections of 

information, which would include snippets of text, phrases or words to remember, and even bits of 

verse. I’d like you each to keep a commonplace book. With this commonplace book, you will compile 

things that might become elements of your own styles. What turns of phrase, words, sentence, images 

and photographs inspire you? A notebook will be provided to this end. All that the commonplace 

ENGL 4120: Writing with Style | Spring 2024 | 1

ook requires of you is the selection and collection of such stylistics elements. You’ll need a keen eye 

and an attuned ear along with scissors and glue. 

Exercises 

As the name suggests, this course element will ask you to complete short exercises in which you apply 

a stylistic principle to your own writing. These are essentially experiments in which you’ll be asked to 

deploy a figure, imitate a style, or edit and revise a text. Most of these assignments will be very brief, 

fewer than 100 words. 

Extended Exercise: Copia 

At the start of the semester, you will be issued a second, smaller notebook. In this notebook you will 

practice an exercise developed by Desiderius Erasmus in his early 16th Century work De Utraque 

Verborum ac Rerum Copia. Designed to help a writer develop an abundance of styles, Erasmus 

proposes and then performs the (re)writing of the same sentence over and over gain. To this end, 

Erasmus writes around 200 versions of the sentence “Your letter delighted me very much.” Over the 

course of the semester, you will do the same. We will share the fruits of our copia at various points 

during the semester. 

Major Assignments 

The course features three main writing assignments: the “Why I Write” essay, the Personal Statement, 

and the Open Letter. Each of these should run 800-900 words. For each of these assignments, we’ll 

follow the same basic procedure. 

• Analysis: First, we’ll read a few examples of the genre in order to familiarize ourselves with its 

structure, its moves, rhetorical situation, and purpose. 

• Proposal: You’ll then write a brief proposal for your version of the assignment, no more than 300 

words. The proposal will outline how you’ll address the genre requirements that we observe in the 

examples that we read. 

• Draft: Once I’ve had a chance to look at the proposal and make some suggestions, you’ll then 

produce a draft of about 400 words, or about half the length of the full assignment. We will 

workshop some of the drafts in class, and I will respond to all of them. You’ll also receive peer 

review on your drafts. 

• Final draft: You’ll then revise the draft according to the feedback you’ve received. The final draft 

should run 800-900 words. 

Portfolio Assignment 

This assignment, which will come at the end of the course, will ask you to do two things: to revise at 

least one of your major assignments and to write an essay presenting your work throughout the 

semester. 

First, you’ll revise at least one of your three major assignments. At this point in the course, you’ll 

have drafted and revised it once already. This will be a further opportunity to refine and polish your 

work. 

Second, you’ll write a portfolio essay of 1800 words. This essay will present the work you’ve done 

in the course. You’ll analyze your own work according to the stylistic principles we’ve been 

studying throughout the course. You will discuss the stylistic experiments you performed in the 

exercises, the forms you’ve applied to your own writing, and the ways in which your style has 

changed. You’ll also draw on secondary sources to present your work. These sources will include 


our main texts, but also sources that I will put on reserve, along with any sources you find in your 

own research. You’ll use these sources to bolster your claims about your stylistic choices (though of 

course you can also use them to explain why you reject “common sense” stylistic advice). Finally, 

this essay will ask you to discuss the rhetorical choices you made throughout the course regarding 

purpose, audience, and context. You will reflect on how and why you constructed the appeals you 

made. 

Final Exam 

The course will feature a brief final exam on terminology we will learn throughout the class. 

Course Texts 

Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, 978-0961392185 

Mark Forsyth, Elements of Eloquence, 978-0-425-27618-1 

All other short readings will be provided on Google Drive. 

Course Concepts 

Rhetoric 

Most generally defined, rhetoric is the use of symbols to produce an effect (e.g., a verbal command to 

“Stop,” a red traffic light, or a Journey song imploring us “Don’t Stop Believing”). Rhetoric assumes 

that the use of language is symbolic action. The famous “word vs. deeds” distinction has no place 

here. Though rhetoric has become a negative word within political circles and contemporary media, it 

has a rich history as one of the oldest intellectual pursuits in the Western world. With a focus on 

audience, context, and identification, rhetoric is a potent motive force within a community. As Kenneth 

Walker has written, “rhetoric is a material and semiotic performance that constitutes public 

identities and shares political communities by moving people to collective beliefs and actions.” 

Rhetoric also brings to the table a particular approach to language. As a result of many historical and 

cultural trajectories, language use is largely understood as an activity steeped in signification. In 

short, signification describes the production and understanding of meaning—words, when understood 

in terms of signification—mean, they represent. The primary goal of language (and of rhetoric) in this 

model, then, is to convey that meaning, to communicate some content. But this is not the only way to 

treat language. John Muckelbauer writes, “to my mind, rhetoric has always encouraged [going all the 

way back to the sophists of Ancient Greece] something different than this signifying approach to 

language. More precisely, I think rhetoric offers the possibility of attending to a dimension of language 

that is irreducible to the entire apparatus of signification.” For Muckelbauer, and for us, rhetoric allows 

us to ask different sorts of questions. Rhetoric asks "what force does language have?“ 

How can it impact actions? What effects does it produce (one of which may be "meaning")? In its 

classical incarnation, in the work of Gorgias and other "sophists;' if I want to persuade the polis of 

something, I'm not necessarily trying to get them to simply comprehend my message or even 

trying to get them to understand anything at all; I'm primarily just trying to get them to do 

something. (Of course in this classical version, I would likely want them to at least understand what 

I want them to do, but such understanding would not be the goal of my discourse, only a hinge 

toward that goal.) 

We will engage rhetoric, and so style, primarily in terms of what it does. One thing rhetoric might 

do is mean, but it does many more things besides. 


Style 

Our understanding of rhetoric necessarily shapes our engagement with style. Style is not merely the 

dressing up of language. Style is not simply a superficial addition atop substance. The common 

expression “style vs. substance” has no place here. This binary presumes a world of inert matter, stable 

concepts, and static beings over which style is sprinkled like so much seasoning. But we must ask, is 

KFC still KFC without the Colonel’s famous blend of 11 herbs and spices? Style is constitutive of 

substance. Style generates effects and those effects extend down into and around that which is 

styled. Style makes. Style changes. Style puts into motion. Style substantiates. 

It is also important to acknowledge, in the context of rhetoric, that’s one’s style is never entirely 

one’s own. Whatever a given style might be, that style is composed of (or cobbled together from) 

what we find at hand. To write is to participate in both language and culture. To write is to participate 

in language, which moves us and makes our minds. Research suggests that we think in and with 

language. The language available to us affords and constrains how and what we write: vocabulary, 

concepts, patterns of thought. To write is to participate in culture, which is composed, in part, through 

shared texts: laws, religious writings, literature, codes of conduct, advertisements. Culture supplies the 

forms and expectations that shape how, when and why we write. Thus, we don’t so much as have a 

style as we participate in stylings. 

Transduction 

Transduction, which I’ll define in just a second, is a term related to possibly more familiar terms like 

induction, deduction and education. All these terms share the Latin root word duce, which means “to 

lead.” Education leads out, induction leads into, and deduction leads us down These related terms 

capture ways of thinking that are also always forms of movement. Education draws students out in the 

world. Deduction discerns general principles from a world of particulars. Transduction—meaning “to 

lead across”—describes a movement transforming that which is moving. In his “Posthumanism as 

Postscript,” Casey Boyle writes, "Where transfer denotes carrying something from one domain to the 

next […], transduction describes the process through which something changes as it moves across 

domains” (195). And this something isn’t singular; it emerges because of transduction. 

Recall the experience of hearing your recorded voice. Is that how I really sound? Well, yes and no. Yes, 

because your voice is always mediated, and no, because as always mediated there is no one way 

“your” voice always sounds. Your voice is not a thing transmitted from one place to another. Voice is 

transduced over and over again across the signals in your brain, across your vocal cords, across the 

vibrations in the air, across the stereo-cilia of an ear, across the transducer of a condenser microphone. 

Any voice is always styled—each and every time brought into being through the action of 

transduction. We could then say that style transduces: style is what moves a some thing across and in 

so doing makes it what it is. Style is not then some extra flourish you add to your static and singular 

voice; style is the means by which any particular voice emerges. 


Grading 

For this course, I will not be “grading” your work in the traditional sense of assigning some number or 

letter that is meant to indicate its quality, we’re going to practice a form of “contract grading,” by 

which I mean that your grade will be tied your completion of a set of tasks. The more tasks you 

complete, the better your grade is. Why do this? For many reasons, which can all be boiled down to 

one: if I don’t slap letters on your papers, you’re more likely to read the feedback and—even more 

importantly—revise according to the feedback. For a writing intensive class, it’s the feedback that’s 

important, so that’s what I want to concentrate on. 

Here’s how we’re going to make that happen. Below, I have five columns, each one of which lists the 

tasks you must complete in order to achieve the given grade. If you want an A, you’ll have to do 

everything listed in that column. (Notice the adjectives “complete” and “revised.” To have any 

assignment count, you need to complete it fully. Just slapping something together will not count as a 

“completed” assignment. For revisions, you must revise according to my feedback. If you submit a 

“revision” that isn’t really revised, then it’s not going to count as a revision.) 1 

A B C D F 

2 complete major 

assignments 


assignments 


assignment 


assignment 


assignment 

2 revised portfolio 

assignments 


assignment 


assignment 


assignment 

0 revision for 

portfolio 

1 portfolio letter 





9-10 Exercises 

7-8 Exercises 

5-6 Exercises 

4 or fewer exercises 

4 or fewer exercises 

150-200 sentences 





90% on final exam 



60% on final 

60% on final 

1 extension 

1 extension 

2 extensions 

2 extensions 

3 extensions 

maximum 3 UAs 

maximum 4 UAs 

maximum 5 UAs 

6 or more UAs 

6 or more UAs 

Punctual 

Punctual 

Sometimes late 

Frequently late 

Frequently late 

1 As a reminder, this is SLU’s grading scale, which I am obliged to include even though it doesn’t really work for 

our course: A 100-93; A 92-90; B+ 89-87; B 86-83; B- 82-80; C+ 79-77; C 76-73; C- 72-70; D 69-63; F 62 and 

below 


Course Goals 

Eloquentia Perfecta 4: Writing Intensive 

This course is part of the Saint Louis University Core, an integrated intellectual experience completed 

by all baccalaureate students, regardless of major, program, college, school or campus. The Core 

offers all SLU students the same unified approach to Jesuit education guided by SLU’s institutional 

mission and identity and our nine undergraduate Core Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). 

The Writing Intensive course requirement is one of 19 Core Components. The University Core 

SLO(s) that this component is designed to intentionally advance are listed below: 

University Core Student Learning Outcomes 

The Core SLO(s) that this component is intentionally designed to advance are: 

• SLO 3: Assess evidence and draw reasoned conclusions 

• SLO 4: Communicate effectively in writing, speech, and visual media 

Additionally, the Core Component-level Student Learning Outcomes are listed below: 

Component-level Student Learning Outcomes 

Students who complete this course will be able to: 

• Write effectively for specific purposes and audiences 

• Analyze and synthesize claims from a variety of sources 

• Engage in processes of invention and revision that enable evaluation of their own and others’ 

rhetorical choices in written messages and arguments 

• Reflect on the ways in which rhetorically proficient written communication contributes to ethical 

public discourse 

Department Goals 

4000 level Rhetoric & Writing Courses 

Here are the Department’s standard-issue outcomes for what you will do in this course. By the course’s 

end, we will have done all of these things: 

• Design multimodal arguments and persuasive messages for complex situations, including 

academic, public, and professional; 

• Produce arguments that situate various theories of rhetoric, writing, and pedagogy within their 

own historical contexts and in relation to ours; 

• Use disciplinary knowledge in rhetorical history, writing theory, and pedagogy, to respond to 

particular situations and audiences. 

Course Policies 

Attendance and Tardiness: These policies are spoken to in the grading criteria, so I don’t need to add 

anything here except that I will obviously make accommodations where necessary for illness or other 

emergencies. The best advice I can give you is to come to class, and if you can’t come to class, contact 

me and keep me informed if you have to miss class. Don’t disappear. That’s where the problems start. 

Meanwhile, here is the required university statement on attendance. We will of course abide by it. 


Deadlines: Work is due when it is due. But I realize that things happen. That is why I have included 

extensions within the grading criteria. 

Submissions: We will use Google Drive to manage the paper exchange and to do in-class work. Bring 

your laptops. We won’t use them every day, and I will sometimes ask you to close them in order to 

give your attention to the conversation. 

Academic Integrity 

Academic integrity is honest, truthful and responsible conduct in all academic endeavors. The mission 

of Saint Louis University is “the pursuit of truth for the greater glory of God and for the service of 

humanity.” Accordingly, all acts of falsehood demean and compromise the corporate endeavors of 

teaching, research, health care, and community service through which SLU fulfills its mission. The 

University strives to prepare students for lives of personal and professional integrity, and therefore 

regards all breaches of academic integrity as matters of serious concern. The full University-level 

Academic Integrity Policy can be found on the Provost's Office website here. Additionally, each SLU 

College, School, and Center has its own academic integrity policies, available on their respective 

websites. The College of Arts and Sciences policy can be found here. 

Title IX Statement 

Saint Louis University and its faculty are committed to supporting our students and seeking an 

environment that is free of bias, discrimination, and harassment. If you have encountered any form of 

sexual harassment, including sexual assault, stalking, domestic or dating violence, we encourage you 

to report this to the University. If you speak with a faculty member about an incident that involves a 

Title IX matter, that faculty member must notify SLU’s Title IX Coordinator that you shared an 

experience relating to Title IX. This is true even if you ask the faculty member not to disclose the 

incident. The Title IX Coordinator will then be available to assist you in understanding all of your 

options and in connecting you with all possible resources on and off campus. 

Anna Kratky is the Title IX Coordinator at Saint Louis University (DuBourg Hall, room 36; 

anna.kratky@slu.edu; 314.977.3886). If you wish to speak with a confidential source, you may contact 

the counselors at the University Counseling Center at 314.977.TALK or make an anonymous report 

through SLU’s Integrity Hotline by calling 1.877.525.5669 or online. To view SLU’s policies, and for 

resources, please visit the following website. 

Disability Accommodations 

Students with a documented disability who wish to request academic accommodations must formally 

register their disability with the University. Once successfully registered, students also must notify their 

course instructor that they wish to use their approved accommodations in the course. 

Please contact the Center for Accessibility and Disability Resources (CADR) to schedule an 

appointment to discuss accommodation requests and eligibility requirements. Most students on the 

St. Louis campus will contact CADR, located in the Student Success Center and available by email or 

by phone at 314.977.3484. Once approved, information about a student’s eligibility for academic 

accommodations will be shared with course instructors by email from CADR and within the instructor’s 

official course roster. Students who do not have a documented disability but who think they may have 

one also are encouraged to contact to CADR. Confidentiality will be observed in all inquiries. 


University Writing Services 

Students are encouraged to take advantage of University Writing Services (UWS); getting feedback 

benefits writers at all skill levels. Trained writing consultants can help with writing projects, multimedia 

projects, and oral presentations through one-on-one consultations. For more information, visit their 

website or call the Student Success Center at 314.977.3484. 

Assessment & Submission of Work 

The Saint Louis University Department of English is committed to excellent and innovative educational 

practices. In order to maintain quality academic offerings and to conform to relevant accreditation 

requirements, we regularly assess our courses and programs for evidence of student learning 

outcomes achievement. For this purpose, we keep on file representative examples of student work 

from all courses and programs such as: assignments, papers, exams, multimedia presentations, 

portfolios, and results from student surveys, focus groups, and reflective exercises. Thus, copies of 

your work for this course—including exams, presentations, submitted papers or other assignments— 

may be kept on file for institutional research, assessment and accreditation purposes. All samples of 

student work will be anonymized before they are used in assessment exercises. If you prefer that the 

Department of English does not keep your work on file, you need to communicate your decision in 

writing to your instructor. 

Course Calendar 

Monday Wednesday Friday 

1/22 

Gass, “The Ontology of the 

Sentence, or How to Make a World 

of Words” (Drive) 

1/29 

Forsyth, Elements, 17-27, 146-53 

Orwell, “Why I Write” (Drive) 

2/5 

Forsyth, Elements, 28-36 

Ex. 03: Antithesis & Alliteration 

Why I Write Proposal Due 

2/12 

Tufte, “Verb Phrases,” 63-90 


2/19 

“Why I Write” Final Draft Due 

1/17 

Course Introduction 

1/24 

Forsyth, Elements, 1-9, 233-37 

Exercise 01: Grammar 

Demonstration 

1/31 

Williams, “Why I Write” (Drive) 

Didion, “Why I Write” (Drive) 

2/7 


Ex. 04: Grade Proposal 

2/14 

Writing Workshop 

“Why I Write” Draft Due 

2/20 


Tufte, “Dependent Clauses,” 

139-54 

1/19 

Muckelbauer, “Signification” (Drive) 

1/26 

Tufte, “Short Sentences,” 9-34 

Exercise 02: Grammar 

“Diagnostic” 

2/2 


Tufte, “Noun Phrases,” 37-63 

2/9 

Wellness Day (no classes) 

2/16 


2/22 

Tufte, “Adjectives and Adverbs,” 

91-110 and “Prepositions,” 111-24 


2/26 

Tufte, “Conjunctions and 

Coordination,” 125-38 


3/4 

Purdue OWL: Personal Statements 

(links & handouts in Drive) 

Personal Statement Prop. Due 

3/11 

Spring Break (No Class) 

3/18 


3/25 

Tufte, “The Appositive,” 189-204 


Ex. 07: TBD 

4/1 

Easter Monday (no classes) 

4/8 

Tufte, “Free Modifiers,” 171-88 

Ex. 08: TBD 

Open Letter Proposal Due 

4/15 


4/22 


5/1 

Portfolio Revision Workshop 

5/8 


2/28 

Paramedic Method 


Ex. 05: Paramedic Method 

3/6 

Paramedic Method Review 

Ex. 06: Paramedic Method 

3/13 


3/20 

Personal Statement Final Due 

3/27 

Tufte, “Interrogative,” 205-12 and 

“Parallelism,” 217-36 

4/3 

King, “Letter from Birmingham 

Jail” (Drive) 

4/10 


Ex. 09: TBD 

4/17 


4/24 

Tufte, “Syntactic,” 253-72 


5/3 


Portfolio Due Date TBD 

Final Exam Date TBD 

3/1 

Purdue OWL: Personal Statements 


3/8 

Personal Statement Draft Due 


3/15 


3/22 

Tufte, “Sentence Openers,” 155-70 


3/29 

Good Friday (no classes) 

4/5 

Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook” 

(Drive) 

4/12 

Tufte, “Cohesion,” 237-52 

Open Letter Draft Due on 4/6 

4/19 

Ex. 10: TBD 

Open Letter Final Draft Due 

4/26 

Forsyth, Elements, 9-16, 154-57, 

225-30 

5/5

ENGL 4120: Syllabus (SP24)

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