Document Type

Assignment

Publication Date

Spring 2023

Published In

Words Matter: Crafting and Critiquing Rhetorically Effective Styles

Abstract

Does academia encourage an effective academic writing style? Do writers across the disciplines communicate in ways that uphold the values and purposes of liberal arts education? Has the turn in higher ed and scholarship to more public-facing audiences affected how scholars try to reach readers? What stylistic adjustments or improvements would you like to see in the texts you read—and are asked to write—in college? This project asks you to delve into these questions, among others, in relation to a sample of scholarly writing of your choice. Your goal is to analyze and assess how grammatical structures, both in individual sentences and successive sentences in a paragraph, help build a scholar’s style. And whether you deem the passage to be an example of convoluted academese or lucid liberal arts scholarship, you will want in your own paper to communicate logical, precise, well supported ideas and insights about written style as effectively as possible. How can your own scholarly style uphold your values and purpose here?

Funding Agency

Aydelotte Foundation

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Comments

Professor Natalie Mera Ford was awarded an Aydelotte Curricular Grant from the Aydelotte Foundation for use in her spring 2023 course, Words Matter: Crafting and Critiquing Rhetorically Effective Styles (ENGL 002W). The course syllabus and assignment instructions are made freely available here courtesy of the author.

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