Foreword

Why is it that anybody — anybody, a checkout clerk at the QwikStop, a junior high science teacher, a guy driving a drunk-bus — can tell a passage of Hemingway from Faulkner? Or distinguish the Faulkner of Light In August from the Faulkner of “Spotted Horses”? Or hear the difference between Toni Cade Bambara and Joan Didion, even if the listener has never even heard of either author and even if the authors are writing about the same subject? Why does Bruce Springsteen croon with wacky, cracked exuberance in 1973 about

    Madmen drummers bummers and Indians in the summer
        with a teenage diplomat
    In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps
        his way into his hat

and a decade later bleat bleakly,

    I can’t say that I’m sorry
    For the things that we done
    At least for a little while, sir,
    Me and her we had us some fun.

Why? Style. That’s why. But we all knew that already, right?

In Engl 6865 we set out to understand not the why, but the how of style, and the way we did it was with close reading of modern and contemporary writers one week, and imitation exercises, or “inspirations,” as we started calling them, the next. We studied Minimalist Style, Fancy Style, Middle Style, and Oral Style, and everything that didn’t fit in one of those boxes we threw into something called Amalgams & Anomalies. By the end of the semester we’d all written original one-page samples of each style, and I asked the students to pick their favorites for this web-anthology.

The results follow. Turn the page, and enjoy!