The Writer's Style: A Rhetorical Field Guide

By: Paul Butler

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Synopsis: Designed to help all writers learn to use style as a rhetorical tool, taking into account audience, purpose, context, and occasion, The Writer’s Style is not only a style guide for a new generation but a new generation of style guide. The book helps writers learn new strategies inductively, by looking at firsthand examples of how they operate rhetorically, as well as deductively, through careful explanations in the text. The work focuses on invention, allowing writers to develop their own style as they analyze writing from varied genres. In a departure from the deficiency model associated with other commonly used style guides, author Paul Butler encourages writers to see style as a malleable device to use for their own purposes rather than a domain of rules or privilege. He encourages writing instructors to present style as a practical, accessible, and rhetorical tool, working with models that connect to a broad range of writing situations—including traditional texts like essays, newspaper articles, and creative nonfiction as well as digital texts in the form of tweets, Facebook postings, texts, email, visual rhetoric, YouTube videos, and others. Though designed for use in first-year composition courses in which students are learning to write for various audiences, purposes, and contexts, The Writer’s Style is a richly layered work that will serve anyone considering how style applies to their professional, personal, creative, or academic writing.