A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Acknowledgments

{ 85 Acknowledgments Although this book is a distillation of ideas I’ve developed in my writing, editing, and teaching, I’m keenly aware of the people whose influence has shaped my thinking about the nature of a persona, elements of style, and various ways of showing people how to apply those concepts to their own writing. Professor David Novarr, late of Cornell University, comes first to mind, thanks to a graduate seminar of his on the seventeenth-­ century poet and theologian John Donne, the first half of which was devoted to an investigation of Renaissance English prose styles and their varied influenceon thedevotions, sermons, and theological disquisitions of Donne. Yes, it was a very specialized study, far afield from the basics of this book, but it was the first time I realized how a single author, devoted to the truth as he saw it, could write in such different styles as to sound like a different person from one work to the next. For that seminal influence I remain deeply indebted to Novarr. After that experience some fifty-­ five years ago, I developed a continuing interested in style-­ shifting, as the sociolinguists call it. So I put together an anthology, Style in English Prose (1968), to document the wide-­ranging styles and ways of thinking about style in the history of English prose. So, too, I was influenced by Walker Gibson’s textbook, Persona: A Style Study for Readers and Writers (1969), since its basic distinction between “writer-­ style” and “talker-­style”gave me a fruitful wayof introducing students to the idea of style-­shifting as a crucial element in the creation ofa persona. I’m also indebted to mycolleague Richard Lloyd-­Jones, whosewriting assignments embodying rhetorical variations on a theme provided me with a model for writing assignments embodying stylistic variations on a theme. Likewise , I’m grateful to my longtime friend Robert Scholes, whose invitation to collaborate with him on Elements of Writing (1972) provided me with a model for the theme-­and-­variation method I’ve used in this book, thanks to his ingenious method of illustrating elements of grammar and style by means of doing grammatical and stylistic variations on the story of Tarzan, Jane, and Cheetah. For reading and responding to draft ver- 86 } sions of the manuscript, I’m grateful to Jacqueline Blank,Trudy Dittmar, Brooks Landon, Anne Welch, and an anonymous reviewer. Finally, I’m grateful to the University of Iowa Press and the splendid people who had a hand in producing this book, particularly Richard Hendel for his appealing design, Charlotte Wright for her meticulous oversight of manuscript editing, Karen Copp for her careful shepherding of the book through the design and production stages, and Holly Carver for her enthusiastic editorial support from start to finish. ...