Emily Barrow DeJeu

“Language does much of our thinking for us…. In a general as well as a very particular sense, then, a style argues.”

— Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, pp. xi, xii

Introduction

Since its publication in 2006, the slim little textbook The Say/I Say has been widely embraced by students and faculty: it is required reading at more than half of the universities in the United States and is taught in a variety of disciplinary contexts (Birkenstein and Graff). The book is so popular because it demystifies a key part of academic writing that students often find challenging: framing one’s own argument as a response to the arguments of others. The Say/I Say does this demystifying by “isolating [academic writing’s] basic moves, explaining them clearly, and representing them in the form of templates” (Birkenstein and Graff xvi). These templates show students what kinds of conversational moves are common in academic writing and offer sample language that students can use to make those moves in their own writing. For instance, if students want to agree and disagree simultaneously, they might begin with, “Though I concede that ___, I still insist that ___” (65). Or, if students want to make concessions while maintaining disagreement, they might use a template like this: “While it is true that___, it does not necessarily follow that ___” (66).

Templates like these are obviously useful for helping novice writers get started with complex academic writing. But while many instructors have embraced this book as a useful resource precisely because its templates are so expedient, others have worried that template-based approaches are stifling and reductive. In their 2008 review of The Say/I Say, Arthur and Case-Halferty describe it as a “traditional-to-the-point-of-being-clinical textbook” and conclude that the book is “a variation on the My Fair Lady plot: instilling the correct rhetorical manners within students, emphasizing form over content, delivery over substance.” Even positive reviews express concern: while Nelson ultimately praises the book, she admits that at first, she and her colleagues worried about the emphasis on templates: “How little would it take for students—and some instructors—to focus on form at the expense of content—to treat the template like a Mad Libs that just has to be completed?” (107). Also wary of the templates’ potential interference with producing meaningful content, Hollrah and Farmer use several of the book’s templates to compose a purposefully ridiculous argument in favor of farting in public (202) to support their assertion that “this text is more interested in moves than in what gets moved” (203).

When held against the broader backdrop of composition scholarship over the last few decades, this concern with template-based instruction is not surprising. While historically, composition instruction in the United States was focused on helping students learn how to produce effective sentences (Connors), mid- to late-twentieth-century concerns about reductive current-traditional pedagogy (Crowley) and a rising anti-formalism led to what Connors and MacDonald called an “erasure” of language and a dismissal of style in favor of what MacDonald asserts is an emphasis on theory and the social. Like the criticism of The Say/I Say, this pivot away from language-focused teaching was at least partly rooted in concerns that such instruction focused on style at the expense of substance.

Such concerns, of course, assume that style and substance are distinct—that the language in which students deliver their arguments is separate from the substance of those arguments, and therefore emphasis on the language of argumentative discourse moves comes at the expense of helping students think critically about what the content of those moves means. But this dichotomizing of form and content is at odds with a strand of rhetorical thought that dates to antiquity—a strand that sees style and substance as inextricably linked. Indeed, in their preface to The Say/I Say, Birkenstein and Graff draw on this ancient connection between style and substance:

Public orators from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance studied rhetorical topoi or “commonplaces”, model passages and formulas that represented the different strategies available to public speakers. In many respects, our templates echo this classical tradition of imitating established models. (xxiii)

By connecting their templates to rhetorical topoi, Birkenstein and Graff are also drawing connections between these templates and the rhetorical canon of invention, since topoi are often conceived of as the mental “places” where rhetors can go to find starting arguments (Aristotle Rhetoric). Drawing on this ancient conception, Birkenstein and Graff assert that their templates “do more than organize students’ ideas; they help bring those ideas into existence” (xxi) and that the templates enable, rather than stifle, critical thinking by stimulating students to consider content-inducing questions such as, “What would a naysayer say about my argument” and “Do I need to qualify my point?” (xxii). Butler confirms that such a connection between form and invention is warranted: he notes that while scholars in the last few decades have tended to separate the canons of invention and style and to subordinate style, “[style] serves—rather than opposes—an interest in invention” (56–57). Likewise, Young, Becker, and Pike’s theory of tagmemic rhetoric joins heuristics—or methods of asking questions that facilitate the discovery of new ideas—with rhetorical patterns in final written products, and Young and Becker ultimately argue that “In a complete theory [of rhetoric]… a particular style is a characteristic series of choices throughout the entire process of writing, including both discovery (invention) and linguistic selection and grouping (arrangement)” (468).

Further establishing this kind of connection between style and invention, as these scholars do, would surely address some composition scholars’ fears that instruction in an argument’s language and style is reductive and divorced from its substance. And there has been some contemporary interest in paying attention to matters of language and style. For instance, Both Kreuter and Clausson called for a renewed emphasis on style in the composition classroom, highlighting the need to move away from style guide-driven instruction that delegitimizes an array of stylistic choices. In addition, some contemporary composition scholars seem quite interested in language (Aull), and much of this new scholarship highlights the need for language-based pedagogies that draw critical attention to socially constructed beliefs about language (e.g. Gere et al.). Like these scholars, I am interested in bringing a renewed focus to language and style. However, I am particularly interested in how theories of classical rhetoric, drawn from antiquity, unite style and substance in ways that can inform today’s composition instruction.

In that spirit, this article suggests that patterns of discourse (or templates) can be taught as flexible guides that not only give students useful starting language but also aid invention. I begin by offering a brief overview of the history of this style-versus-substance debate, tracing its roots to the ancient Greek debates of Plato and the Sophists. Then, drawing on Fahnestock’s work with figures of speech, I use the figure of antithesis to show how a rhetorical figure—a discourse pattern that relies on particular syntactic arrangements—is also a conceptual tool deeply connected to patterns of reasoning and inference. In making this argument, I draw on experiences in a first-year writing course that I taught, showing how loosely formed templates based on antitheses became the basis not only for my students’ early composing but also for the early invention of their papers’ central arguments, counterarguments, and concessions.

Style Versus Substance: A Brief History

Our field’s contemporary tendency to dichotomize style and substance has its roots in ancient philosophers’ own disagreements about how to understand the role of rhetoric in argumentation. For early Sophists, who rejected the notion of universal or objective truth, the arts of rhetoric (arguing to persuade) and philosophy (pursuing knowledge about reality) were inextricably intertwined and equal in importance. After all, if there is no universal, objective truth, then what is “true” is what people generally agree is true. Therefore, effective arguments (rhetoric) produce provisional consensus about truth (philosophy) (Dillon and Gergel). But for Plato, absolute and universal truth did exist. His theory of “ideal forms” stipulated that physical reality is merely a shadow of true, timeless, absolute reality (Kraut). Therefore, Plato not only believed that the pursuit of absolute truth was possible but also that this pursuit was separate from public argument about practical affairs—in other words, that it was separate from the domain of rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg).

This early split between rhetoric and philosophy persisted well beyond the ancient world. Nearly 900 years after Plato, the Roman philosopher Boethius would argue that because rhetoric deals only in contingent particulars, and not in universal modes of reason and inference, it is subordinate to “dialectic,” or the logical pursuit of truth (Conley). More than a thousand years after Boethius, French logician Peter Ramus would deepen and reify this distinction, asserting that creating arguments was a dialectical—not rhetorical—activity and that rhetoric should concern itself only with “adorning with tropes and figures” and delivering “elegantly with speech and voice” the content which dialectical activity had produced (25).

Ramus’s theory proved influential in part because it emphasized the power of the individual thinker to reason his way to truth via processes of observation and logical thinking. This precipitated a widespread conviction that would ultimately come to characterize modern Western epistemology: that knowledge resided not in the shared, provisional understanding of humans operating together in society (as the Sophists would have it), but rather that it “resulted from the actions of individual minds on the things of the world” (Crowley 4). Invention, says Crowley, became a matter of logical observation and personal inspiration. This kind of invention was understandably a difficult process to teach to students, but “what was susceptible to instruction,” says Crowley, “was the shape discourse ought to assume” if it was to represent this process of individualized invention (96). Students’ written texts were post hoc proof that they were thinking the right way, so “teachers concentrated attention on how a text ought to look when it reflected straight thinking” (Crowley 96). Thus, current-traditional pedagogy’s obsession with form (in particular, with the expository five-paragraph essay) was born. As is widely accepted today, this current-traditional approach to teaching is problematic for a host of reasons, several of which I discuss near the end of this article, and many in our field have rightly abandoned this approach to instruction. In fact, in his review of The Say/I Say, Pickavance notes that instructors’ objections to the book’s templates may stem from the fact that they “seem to recall the current-traditional bogeyman of composition” (439)—a bogeyman from which many of us are eager to distance ourselves.

But another strand of rhetorical thinking unites style and substance, form and invention—and this strand, too, has its roots in the classical tradition. Isocrates, for instance, asserts in Antidosis that “the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire” is not only the defining power that separates us from animals but is also the power that makes human civilization possible (254). For Isocrates, then, eloquence is not merely ornamental; it is the powerful engine that builds society. Building on Isocrates’s work, Cicero was also interested in the union of eloquence and wisdom. In his De Oratore, for instance, the character of Crassus argues against those who would “sever the language from the thoughts like the body from the soul, neither of which separations can be made without destruction” (De Oratore 6). For Crassus—and by extension for Cicero—this “severance between the tongue and the brain” is “unprofitable and reprehensible” (De Oratore 6). Crassus asserts instead that “wise thinking” and “elegant speaking” are linked: “Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language” (De Oratore 6). In other words, according to Cicero, style and substance are inextricably connected, and attempting to sever wise substance from eloquent style is an “unprofitable and reprehensible” enterprise because it reduces both.

Birkenstein and Graff echo these ancient assertions when they suggest that their templates, which aim in part to help students adopt an academic voice and style, also support creativity and critical thinking. However, what is missing from their defense is a clear explanation of how, exactly, these templates spur critical thinking and invention. The templates might nudge students to ask inventional questions such as, “Do I need to qualify my point?”, as Birkenstein and Graff point out, but an instructor could prompt students to ask those questions in any number of ways. Indeed, Young, Becker and Pike’s tagmemic theory of rhetoric offers heuristics designed to guide students through such discovery-inducing prompts. The question, to my mind, is why templates, specifically? Pickavance reflects this uncertainty in his review of The Say/I Say: while he notes that the templates do “produce a kind of discursive momentum”, showing students how to “profitably extend their thinking on a single subject”, he also admits that he is unsure of their inventional power: “Whether or not these ‘moves’ generate thought, it is difficult to say” (439).

Rhetorical Figures as Forms of Thought: Antithesis and Its Cola

It is difficult, that is, until one turns to Jeanne Fahnestock’s remarkable work with rhetorical figures of speech—work which answers the question of how a template can generate thought and, more broadly, how the canons of style and invention can work in tandem. Rhetorical figures of speech, which were first cataloged in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, have conventionally been classified as figures because they deviate from straightforward, “normal” language usage. The idea was that orators could employ figures of speech for effect, to stylize and elevate their delivery. The Rhetorica Ad Herennium listed nearly 60 figures of speech, such as repetitio (repeating words at the beginning of successive clauses), gradatio (arranging words, phrases, or clauses in order of increasing importance), frequentio (bringing together various points made and forcefully presenting them again) and demonstratio (offering very vivid descriptions) (Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium).

Fahnestock noted that over time, “value-added” theories of figuration like Ramus’s took root (Rhetorical Figures 24). These theories held that figures of speech are pleasing stylistic flourishes that one adds after an argument has been composed. In other words, they are ornaments, separate from an argument’s actual substance. But Fahnestock argues that rhetorical figures are best understood not as decorative ornaments but as “epitomes” of forms of thinking (Rhetorical Figures 24). As Fahnestock’s work shows, the syntactic arrangement of some key figures of speech reflects inferential processes of reasoning that form the core of an argument’s substance. In other words, some figures are vehicles for connecting style with substance. The antithesis, for instance, offers an excellent example of this relationship between the figure as a syntactical pattern and as the epitome of inferential thinking.

Drawing on Aristotle, Fahnestock defined antithesis as “a verbal structure that places contrasted or opposed terms in parallel or balanced cola or phrases” (Rhetorical Figures 46). Contrast is important—it is what creates the antithesis—but so is the parallel arrangement of the cola (a Greek term that roughly translates to “clause”). Balanced cola of equal length, whose language is exactly parallel, produces the periodic speech that Aristotle found so satisfying. This tight parallel arrangement, combined with the fact that antithesis leverages binary pairs of opposites inherent in many languages, produces a figure of speech that, when used correctly, heightens and perfects the intended contrast while also pointing the audience toward what seems like an inevitable conclusion. Fahnestock offered the following illustrative example:

You have a lot to gain by winning / and if you lose, it won’t cost you anything.
You have everything to win / and you will lose nothing.
You have everything to win / and nothing to lose. (Rhetorical Figures 50)

While the semantic content of each sentence is the same, the third is syntactically satisfying and offers a sharper and more memorable contrast. It is also immediately comprehensible. In fact, Fahnestock noted that antithesis, which is imperfect and implicit in expert texts, is often perfected and thus made easier to understand in popularized texts since perfect antithesis distills and clarifies a complex argument into a memorable relationship between opposites. Figure 1 offers an example from Fahnestock’s work.

Imperfect antithesis in a scientific text	Perfect antithesis in a popularized version
In general, Antarctic temperatures increased gradually while Greenland temperatures were decreasing or constant, and the termination of Antarctic warming was apparently coincident with the onset of rapid warming in Greenland.	Antarctic temperature gradually rises while it is cold over Greenland and gradually cools while it is relatively warm over Greenland.

As the perfected antithesis in Figure 1 suggests, antithesis is useful for style and delivery because it is balanced, satisfying, easy to grasp, and memorable. But antithesis is also a conceptual device—it is essentially the linguistic arrangement of Aristotle’s topos of opposites, in which a speaker “considers the opposite of the thing in question” to build an argument (Aristotle, Rhetoric 100). As Aristotle explained in both Rhetoric and Topics, the topos of opposites works because it draws on a commonsense form of reasoning that virtually any listener would immediately recognize: if you believe something is true, then you will not believe its opposite, because its opposite must be false (and vice versa). Therefore, when a rhetor is working to build an argument for, say, ending a terrible war, they can turn to the topos of opposites for inventional purposes and the use of antithesis to further establish and perfect both the argument’s content and its stylized arrangement. The result, said Aristotle, would be, “If war is the cause of our current trouble, then peace is what we need to put things right again” (Rhetoric 100, emphasis added).

Aristotle noted that the topos of opposites works to prove something true or false, but its applications are broader than that. This kind of reasoning by contraries is so fundamental that it basically propels thinking: if given a sentence like “The opposite of hot is ___”, a listener will supply “cold” almost without thinking. Reasoning by contraries is also fundamental to basic inquiry: people, from small children to tenured professors, compare things and note meaningful differences to learn more about those objects of study. Connecting the figure to its underlying mode of reasoning explains why antithesis, which is essentially a syntactic template built to hold contrasting ideas, is both a stylistic device and a vehicle for generating and sharpening thought, or as Fahnestock calls it, a “frame for invention” (Rhetorical Figures 52). Working recursively, its arrangement both reflects and helps to create and sustain critical thinking. Antithesis becomes, simultaneously, a means to generate argumentative content and deliver it in compelling and memorable ways that will resonate with an audience.

Antithesis and Its Cola in the First-Year Writing Classroom

These “frames for invention” have a role to play in First-Year Composition (FYC) classrooms, too. In this section, I first show how loose antithetical templates helped my students generate arguments for a paper comparing two different genres. Then, I show how the arrangement of antithesis—contrasting cola—helped my students leverage common templates for managing doubt to both generate and present counterarguments and concessions. I should note, however, that in what follows, I am not presenting the results of a research study. While teacher-based research that tests the effectiveness of instructional strategies (Boscolo) can have real benefits for composition pedagogy (Cochran-Smith and Lytle), I am not offering such research here. When I taught the FYC course described in the following sections, I was a new graduate instructor, and while my study of classical rhetorical theory shaped how I taught the course, I was not imagining a formal study in that vein and so did not secure institutional permissions to use students’ work for research purposes. Therefore, what follows is best described as a post hoc reflection on a teaching practice that I developed and refined over six semesters. I discuss the contribution and limitations of this sort of approach at the end of the article.

Antithesis in a Comparative Genre Analysis Writing Assignment

In a FYC course that I taught from 2016–2020, I used antithesis as both a template to help students craft topic sentences and a “frame for invention” to help them generate argumentative content. I used this approach most often when I taught a unit on Comparative Genre Analysis (CGA), a pedagogical strategy created by Wolfe et al. CGA asks students to compare the features of a familiar genre with those of an unfamiliar target genre. This comparative analysis raises students’ awareness about the ways in which textual features correspond to features of the activity systems in which those genres circulate (Wolfe et al. 45). Early in my course, I asked students to perform a CGA of an academic research article and an opinion-editorial and to write a brief essay outlining their analysis. As my first-year students were generally familiar with the op-ed genre but far less familiar with the research article genre, the purpose of this assignment was to familiarize them with features of academic writing. Students went on to spend the rest of the semester engaging with these features as they proposed an original research project, enacted that proposal’s methodology, and then used their findings as the basis for their own academic research article.

Students’ CGA analyses began with several classes’ worth of discussion and group activities before culminating in a formal written paper. That paper asked students to identify several genre features that occurred in both texts, describe similarities or differences in the way those features manifested, and connect those to similarities or differences in each text’s rhetorical situation—its audience, purpose, and exigence (Bitzer). While students did note similarities, they latched on to fundamental differences more quickly. Therefore, early in our CGA work, as students began to identify and name differences, I introduced the basic antithetical template shown in Example 1:

1. While the op-ed is ___, the academic article is ___.

This template served as a frame for invention right from the start, as it helped students spot differences that, while facile, were good starting points for deeper analysis, as Example 2 suggests. Here and throughout, the examples that I provide are not drawn from actual student papers but rather are distillations and summaries of trends that I saw in students’ responses over the six semesters that I taught the course.

2. While the op-ed is easy to read, the academic article is hard to read.
While the op-ed is short, the academic article is long.
While the op-ed is informal, the academic article is formal.
While the op-ed is written for regular people, the academic article is written for experts.

Once students identified some immediate differences, I asked them to choose one that they found interesting and to delve deeper into precisely what in each text was producing that difference. For instance, if students zeroed in on the easy/hard-to-read binary, I asked them to point to textual features that made the text easier/harder to read. Students often started with the op-ed (the more familiar of the two genres) and, after some recursive discussion, arrived at half an antithesis like that in Example 3:

3. While the op-ed’s short paragraphs, accessible vocabulary, and use of colloquial expression make it easy to read, the academic article ___.

Of course, antithesis as an inventional frame worked the same way here as it did when students were noting more obvious differences in example 2: one half of the frame suggested what the other half should contain. That is, the template became a catalyst for invention; it helped students figure out what they wanted to say. In this case, the three underlined features in the op-ed’s half of the antithesis pointed students toward parallel and opposite kinds of features in the academic article. Attempting to balance and complete the second cola in Example 3 nudged students to analyze specific elements of the academic article that related to the features named in the first cola, and this analysis then helped them finish the antithesis, as Example 4 suggests:

4. While the op-ed’s short paragraphs, accessible vocabulary, and use of colloquial expressions make it easy to read, the academic article’s lengthy paragraphs, technical vocabulary, and use of discipline-specific jargon make it more challenging to interpret.

By this point, students had moved from generalizing about facile differences between the two texts to pinning down more precise, interesting differences that could be investigated via close textual analysis. In the process of creating an argument like that shown in Example 4, they had also crafted a topic sentence for a paragraph or set of paragraphs in their final papers.

It is worth noting that example 4 does not employ the perfect, parallel opposite terms that Aristotle finds so satisfying in ideal antithesis: “colloquial expressions” and “discipline-specific jargon”, for instance, certainly contrast but are not truly opposing terms. But even ancient rhetoricians accepted that antithesis could be presented in contrasting but not directly opposed terms. The writer of the Ad Alexandrum, for instance, notes that while a “double antithesis [that is, both of sense and of wording]” is “best to use”, a true antithesis can present contrasting ideas without using binary pairs of opposite terms (Aristotle, Complete Works 2296). In fact, Fahnestock points out that using contrasting concepts in this way can “force terms apart” and set them before the audience as directly opposed, thus creating “nonce antonyms out of terms not opposed before the argument” (Rhetorical Figures 69). Regarding Example 4, a looser kind of antithesis allowed students to take contrasting (but not directly opposed) concepts like “colloquial expressions” and “discipline-specific jargon” and set them as opposing terms for the purposes of building an argument focused on genre differences.

Contrasting Cola and Templates for Managing Doubt

In addition to being both a stylistic prompt and a tool for helping students generate content for an argument, I found that the antithesis’s structure—its contrasting cola—also helped my students adopt an appropriate discursive stance, aiding them in creating counterarguments and making concessions designed to win over skeptical academic readers. This use aligned with the progression of my course: after writing their CGA papers, the remaining two-thirds of the course was devoted to teaching students about the process of academic inquiry. Whereas the CGA unit asked students to write an expository essay to demonstrate their understanding of a key rhetorical concept (genre), this unit on inquiry asked students to write as junior researchers who were tasked with proposing new research, conducting the proposed research methodology, and then documenting their findings in an academic article. Therefore, this unit required students to engage with counterarguments, limitations, and exceptions in a way that the CGA unit did not and so required more consideration of what a reader would accept when it came to attempts at knowledge-making.

As research has shown, most novice writers do not naturally embrace doubt and conceptual complexity in their writing. Instead, they tend to favor certainty and clarity (Wilder), This shows up in their writing: novice writers tend to make emphatic claims that do not allow room for nuanced debate (Aull and Lancaster; Brown and Aull), and they are often reluctant to deal with counterarguments, exceptions, and anomalies in their arguments (Wilder and Yagelski). One substantial benefit of contrasting cola templates for managing doubt, therefore, is that they reinforce the idea that acknowledging counterarguments and making concessions are valid rhetorical moves. At the same time, these contrasting cola templates give students starting language to help them make such moves in their own writing. However, since many templates for managing doubt utilize the structure of contrasting cola, they can also serve inventional purposes in the same way that templates based on antithesis can. As Figure 2 shows, several of The Say/I Say’s common templates for agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously take the form of contrasting cola.

Template for Agreeing and Disagreeing Simultaneously
Though I conceded that ___, I still insist that ___.
X is right that ___, but she seems on more dubious ground when she claims that ___.
While X is probably wrong when she claims that ___, she is right that ___.
I am of two minds about X’s claim that ___. On the one hand, I agree that ___. On the other hand, I’m not sure if ___.

This basic contrasting cola structure for making concessions and responding to counterarguments has been framed by some universities as a helpful master template for teaching students how to deal with opposing voices. For instance, California State University Bakersfield’s Writing Resource Center, in a handout summarizing what they consider the most important The Say/I Say templates, puts “On the one hand, ___. On the other hand, ___.” at the top of the list (“The Say/I Say Templates”). Notably, this template does not appear anywhere in the textbook; rather, it is a distillation of many templates like those in Figure 2 which are predicated on this “one hand/other hand” binary.^[1] Research confirms that this binary is a useful way to organize discourse: studies of lexical bundles, or commonly recurring phrases in academic writing (e.g. Cortes), have found that “on the other hand” is one of the most frequently occurring lexical bundles across all disciplines (Byrd and Coxhead; Chen and Baker).

I introduced students to the “one hand/other hand” template for managing doubt when I taught them how to write the literature reviews that I required them to include in their research proposals. Learning how to use this basic contrasting cola format for managing other scholars’ disagreement and doubt seemed to ease students into understanding first, that knowledge is provisional and contingent even among experts, and second, that representing others’ disagreement fairly is a crucial first step in framing one’s own research. An example will help illustrate this point. One semester, when my course topic explored competing conceptions of the purpose of higher education, a group of students elected to research the role of student protest in higher education. This group read six or seven articles (which I provided) on this topic. In the process of reading and discussing these articles, they quickly realized that published writing on this point can be easily divided into agree/disagree categories regarding the benefits of campus activism: some experts argue that campus activism is beneficial to students, while others contend that it can be detrimental. Once students spotted this difference, I introduced them to the “one hand/other hand” template shown in Example 5 to help them refine this basic difference:

5. On the one hand, some experts argue that campus activism is beneficial because ___. On the other hand, other experts disagree, arguing that campus activism is detrimental because ___.

Completing each “because” clause became an exercise in invention: students had to engage carefully with the arguments on each side of this debate to accurately represent both sides and distill these arguments into a memorable summary. Here again, as outlined previously, the figure itself helped nudge and direct students’ thinking in productive ways, since completing one “because” clause created a set of initial terms that set the trajectory for completing the other. Example 6 offers summarizes the kinds of arguments students typically generated when they engaged with this one hand/other hand template for describing student activism scholarship:

6. On the one hand, some experts argue that campus activism is beneficial because it teaches students about democratic engagement and gives marginalized students a voice. On the other hand, other experts disagree, arguing that campus activism is detrimental because it can interfere with academic learning and stifle freedom of speech.

Typically, students used some version of each of these “one hand/other hand” sentences as topic sentences for two consecutive literature review paragraphs.

Once students were familiar with this basic contrasting cola structure for managing doubt, I encouraged them to use a version of it in their final academic research papers to contend with counterarguments. For instance, I found that the “Though I conceded that ___, I still insist that ___” template proved useful for helping students understand that it is appropriate—and sometimes necessary—to acknowledge the strengths of a counterargument while still asserting that their own argument is valid (Birkenstein and Graff 64–66). One of the concessions many of my students had to make as they drafted their final research papers was the limitations of their findings. After writing their research proposals, students had about three-and-a-half weeks to conduct research for their final research papers, and in this time, they typically engaged with five to seven source texts to help them build their arguments—hardly all the relevant published scholarship. Some students also opted to circulate surveys or conduct interviews to supplement their arguments with original data, but these data sets were highly provisional since they were never representative or large enough to achieve statistical power. As students worked on organizing their findings into a set of claims, many began to realize that discerning readers might object to these limitations, and students often came to me concerned: how could they state with any kind of certainty that X is true, or that Y is the best approach, given these limitations and possible objections? At this point, I introduced them to another template for managing doubt, shown in Example 7:

7. While the conclusions I have offered in this paper are limited, ___.

Students often included some version of this template at the beginning of a paragraph that addressed the limitations and counterarguments they had just outlined in a previous paragraph. Again, the template proved useful for invention because the first clause—the paper’s arguments are limited—nudged students to answer those limitations in the second clause in a way that a skeptical reader would find reasonable. In my experience, this was a rich and inventive moment for students, as it forced them to evaluate and distill their argument to show exactly what contributions their research was making. Even if their findings were limited and provisional, why were they useful? What could other students and scholars glean from them? “Limitations” in the first clause became the term that guided them to consider an opposing term for their own work. Example 8 summarizes some of the typical ways that students used this template as the basis for constructing their own sentences:

8. It is true that the conclusions I have offered in this paper are limited. Still, I would like to suggest that they offer a useful starting point for future research to explore…

While the conclusions I have offered in this paper are somewhat limited, they are nevertheless important because…

To summarize, the conclusions I have offered in this paper are limited. However, I still maintain that they could serve as the foundation for…

As Example 8 shows, with this template, contrasting pairs like “limited/useful,” “limited/important,” and “limited/foundational” helped students make appropriate concessions while also clarifying and asserting what contributions their own research was making. In fact, for some of my students, the process of completing the second clause helped them reconceptualize the argument they were actually making, versus the one they thought they were making when they began writing, which usually led to productive edits in their papers’ initial framing and research questions.

A Return to Current-Traditional Teaching?

At this point, it would be reasonable to wonder if, in celebrating the power of form to guide thinking, I am suggesting some sort of return to current-traditional teaching. I am not, for two reasons. First, the templates I have reviewed here, which are predicated on contrasting cola, are useful not as static, rigid prescriptions for writing but rather as flexible heuristics. It is the basic contrasting cola arrangement that is useful; the language surrounding those cola can be adapted in any number of ways. In addition, as I hope my examples have shown, the way those cola are presented to readers varies: they can be presented in a single sentence, or separately, in multiple sentences. Contrasting ideas can be offered together, in a single paragraph, or they can span paragraphs. The kind of flexibility for which I am advocating contrasts with the rigidity of current-traditional pedagogies, which Crowley suggests evolved in ways that favor inflexible rules not because they support students’ inventional processes but because they are so easy to teach.

Second, I have argued that the structure of contrasting cola has its basis in what Aristotle (Rhetoric) called the topos of opposites, or reasoning by contraries. In other words, the figure of antithesis is not a figure for its own sake; it does not organize language arbitrarily. Rather, it reflects an inferential process of reasoning and thinking that seems endemic to any humans whose language utilizes binary pairs. The relationship is recursive, of course; the figure both draws on and perpetuates this kind of reasoning by contraries. But the point is that the figure itself, and the myriad kinds of templates that its contrasting cola structure affords, are rooted in thinking and reasoning processes. This is not necessarily the case for the prescriptive forms of current-traditional pedagogies, such as the five-paragraph essay, which are less a reflection of actual argument-creating processes and more a reflection of institutions’ desires to streamline writing instruction and assessment.

Instead, in advocating for the use of loose antithetical templates to spur invention and shape composition, I am arguing for something closer to imitatio, or imitation. Imitation was the second part of the three-part system of classical rhetorical education: precepts (also called theory), imitation, and practice (Sullivan). Imitation, according to Corbett, involved first analyzing a model passage to determine what made its style effective and then leveraging that form for one’s own purposes. While imitation could certainly be reduced to mere copying, in the ancient tradition, it demanded creativity and critical thinking, since it required rhetors to take a model’s basic shape and supply it with original content (Sullivan). Indeed, Corbett links “pattern practice”—a pedagogical approach closely connected with template-based writing that involved helping students analyze and then emulate model sentences—to the classical tradition of imitatio. Ultimately, the aim of imitation in the classical tradition—and which I argue should be the aim of any modern-day template-based instruction—was to help students quickly progress from close imitation of a model to more sophisticated, complex, and innovative uses of existing forms (Crowley and Hawhee). As Corbett argues, this kind of imitation can ultimately enable, not stifle, creativity and invention; in his estimation, imitation “unlocks our powers and sets us free to be creative, original, and ultimately effective. Imitate that you may be different” (250, emphasis in original).

Conclusion

I hope that in making this case for the value of writing templates, I am in part making the case that ancient rhetoric handbooks like the Rhetorica Ad Herennium still have some relevance for today’s composition instructors. It is widely accepted that Aristotle’s Rhetoric has many modern pedagogical applications. Virtually all composition instructors reference ethos, pathos, and logos as means of persuasion. Likewise, reminders to know and remember one’s audience are common refrains in writing classrooms. Aristotle’s conception of topoi has also been leveraged for useful pedagogy-related kinds of analysis (e.g. Coulson; Fahnestock and Secor; Walsh; Wilder; Wilder and Wolfe; Wolfe). However, texts like the Ad Herennium have not survived in the same way, no doubt because they often feel uncomfortably didactic and therefore irrelevant to modern classroom contexts. But as Fahnestock’s work suggests, lists of stylistic figures like those included in Ad Herennium—particularly those that connect figures of speech with inferential lines of reasoning, as antithesis does—can be fruitful resources for helping novice writers invent and arrange written arguments. While this paper explores just one figure, others may be equally fruitful for novice writers. For instance, incrementum and gradatio, two figures which can be used to build hierarchies, are closely connected to Aristotle’s topoi of comparison by degrees and cause/effect relationships (Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures). It seems likely that these figures could be productively adapted into flexible templates to help novice writers construct comparative and causal arguments.

Of course, the extent to which the template-based instruction I outline in this article helped my students create better or more effective writing, compared to students who did not receive such instruction, is not clear. What I have offered here is simply my own reflections based on informal observations of the extent to which template-based instruction seemed to support my students’ inventional and composing processes. Future research could certainly build on these initial observations and formalize the extent to which template-based writing proves effective in FYC contexts. I can imagine, for instance, a reflection-based study that asked students to reflect on their use of templates to help them generate ideas or get started with a difficult writing task. Likewise, a quasi-experimental study (Lam and Wolfe) that compared the writing of students who did and did not receive template-based instruction could help gauge the extent to which template-based instruction helps students produce more effective, sophisticated, and nuanced academic writing.

However, while this article does not explore students’ perceptions of using templates for writing or the extent to which template-based teaching creates effective outcomes for students, I hope it makes the case that using templates to teach writing need not be prescriptive or reductive. Stylistic templates based on lines of reasoning and inference—like the antithesis—can instead be framed as flexible heuristics that serve as a springboard for rich and inventive thinking. Framed in this way, templates are useful not only for helping students make challenging rhetorical moves and adopt an academic voice but also for helping them to think critically and engage productively in processes of invention. This contribution aligns with Susan Peck MacDonald’s call for a return to language-based instruction in the college writing classroom: she notes that instead of treating all language-oriented teaching as a kind of reductive formalism, we should instead see it as a way to, among other things, offer students “a repertoire of language options for writing what one wants to communicate” (617). When treated as flexible heuristics that correspond to patterns of reasoning, this is precisely what templates for academic writing can do. More broadly, flexible templates offer concrete ways to help students understand that language and thought are fundamentally connected. This, in turn, can move our students beyond transmission models of writing and eschew any notions that attending to the style and arrangement of written text is simply an exercise in “prettying up” their work. It can, in Fahnestock’s words, help students understand that “a style argues” (Rhetorical Figures xxi).

Notes

[1] This one hand/other hand template is closely related to another figure that leverages contrasting cola: the dirimens copulatio. In this figure, the rhetor offers a statement and then follows it with a contrary, qualifying statement. “On the one hand/on the other hand” is one syntactic arrangement of this figure; another is “not only/but also”.