Diction does make a difference

As much as I wanted to love Elbow's "The Music of Form," it was difficult to follow his form.  I do appreciate his concern that "traditional techniques" for organizing a paper are not always the most useful way and that writing from "perplexity" is a viable alternative to compositional organization.  He confounded this discussion with the force of his "music metaphor."  I also agree with him that it is a good idea to read your drafts aloud so that you can hear if our writing will "pull the reader through and where our words sit limp and boring." (p656) But he uses such elevated diction to say this, with words like "temporal" and "aural" he risks loosing me as a reader and I wondered if he had followed his own advice (read it aloud.)

It made a difference for me that Barry M. Kroll, in "Arguing Differently." used a more conversational writing style and simpler diction.  I am probably going to assign his essay to my students as a first reading as we enter the "Argumentative Paper" unit.  Most of them already know the thesis structure, and even in working on their "Exploratory" essay they default to an adversarial tone.  Even though I don't have enough time to give as much attention to arguing differently as Kroll explains, it would be valuable for them to at least survey other approaches to arguing: conciliatory, integrative, or deliberate.  Since I am re-grouping students based on the "themes" of their exploratory questions, and having each team collaborate on their final project, I may also ask that each team take a different approach to the argument.  Of course this means I will need more information than is in this article.