Something about the Written Delivery of the Line

Abstract

It is not happenstance that there is such a pervasive reliance on metaphors of the body to describe what a sentence does on the page. These metaphors point to a relationship between style and delivery, one that blurs the line between each. Setting recent redefinitions of delivery alongside teachers of writing talking about style, I work in this article through what one of my students calls “written delivery.” This written delivery asks that we—teachers and students, readers and writers—rethink not only what we do with sentences, but also how we understand the relationship between delivery and style, reader and writer.

Keywords:

• delivery
• sentence
• style
• teaching of writing

Acknowledgments

For their thoughtful responses to earlier drafts of this project, I thank Dave Bartholomae, Paul Kameen, Don Bialostosky, Cory Holding, Bruce Horner, the audiences at the Seattle Pacific University Arts and Humanities Colloquium and at the 2016 RSA Conference in Atlanta, RSQ editor Susan Jarratt, and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹ A sampling of Porchia’s aphorisms are collected in the ninth edition of Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, and my assignment comes from the second Assignment for Writing (Bartholomae and Petrosky 480–81). For more on Porchia’s life, see W. S. Merwin’s prefatory remarks to his 2003 translation of Porchia’s Voices.

² I refer to Ogot by her full name in an effort to situate her as a Writer, a Writer to be taken seriously alongside Porchia and others quoted throughout this essay. See Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, and Charles Paine on quoting and citing student work (5–6).

³ Convention requires a [sic] following Ogot’s un-capitalized “this” of “this one is going to be my favorite.” Rather than insert [sic] into student writing––which muddies the text, distracts from what the student accomplishes as a writer, and reinforces the notion that what distinguishes student writing is error––consider this footnote a blanket [sic] for all quoted material in this essay.

⁴ For calls to return to the sentence, see Paul Butler; Stanley Fish; Verlyn Klinkenborg; Laura R. Micciche; and Sharon A. Myers. For histories of sentence-level instruction, see again Butler; Robert J. Connors “Erasure,” “Grammar,” and “Rhetoric”; and Shirley Rose. For perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the historical, theoretical, and curricular place of style within Composition and Rhetoric, see T. R. Johnson and Tom Pace’s edited collection Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy.

⁵ Connors’s piece is a revision of an article published ten years earlier in Rhetoric Review. In the reprint for Reynolds’s collection, Connors notes, “Given the speed of technological change, it will probably be necessary to update [this essay] every decade” (65). The first piece appeared in 1983, its revision in 1993. Connors passed away in 2000; I do not know if he planned another revision for 2003.

⁶ For more on delivery and gender, see Jody Enders; Roxanne Mountford. For more on delivery and disability, see Peter Wayne Moe “Revealing.”

⁷ Butler disagrees, arguing that sentence-level instruction and the process movement have a shared concern of invention: invention of a sentence, invention of content, invention of the self, invention of a voice (84–85). See also Johnson (32).

⁸ For more on punctuation and ancient Greek, see Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee (335); see also Richard Graff (26, 28).

⁹ Her aphorisms are chiasms. See Moe, “Of Chiasms.”