Three ideas about nonfiction writing from Chris Anderson’s Style as Argument.
[I meant to post this up on my Teaching Blog but published it here by mistake, as I have been doing lately. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to WWAATD readers.]
1. “rhetoric of particularity.” The concreteness of some scenes, he says, “carries the burden of meaning.” Rather than telling us exactly what is happening or interpreting a situation as such—as, say, a research paper or journalism story might do—writers such as Joan Didion or Albert Goldbarth “dramatize” the writer “in a particular place and time,” as she does in “The White Album,” and Koestenbaum does here in merely giving us entries in “Thrifting” and “Notes on Not Now.”
2. “rhetoric of gaps.” Withholding commentary and interpretation at every level of language. Deliberate omission of transitional words, phrases, paragraphs. Because of this, the reader is required to make meaning for him/herself. By letting facts resonate without commentary, they leave us pondering them without having our hand held with a particular meaning.
3. “rhetoric of process.” Highly tentative, grounded in the process in that moment. Make a statement, then amends that statement with a modification or clarification or retraction. Instead of merely erasing the initial writing and leaving us with perhaps the more definitive observation, Didion, and to perhaps a lesser extent Koestenbaum, lets both stand. This gives us the mimetic/diegetic impressions of thinking happening as the writing is happening. “The parentheticals, repeated predicates, multiple conjunctions, and cumulative modifications,” Anderson writes, “reflect this spontaneity.”
–Chris Anderson’s Style as Argument
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Thanks for the group invite. I try to read these whenever you post them. Now I’ll have even more incentive. Real helpful essay in the Writer’s Chronicle that came yesterday: An Interview with Michael Steinberg that doive home much of what you’ve been yakkin (eloquently and brilliantly, of course) about for three semesters – the difference/similarities between essay/memoir and the Gutkind CNF vs. the Steinberg CNF brand. OMG this stuff is becoming my pleasure reading!