As I read through The Centrality of Style, I was increasingly aware of the argument that style in writing was the contested middle-ground where the personal engages with the social, or to put it in another way, style’s engagement with communicative purpose is dialectical. Through the essays of Rhodes, Carlo, and Greer, there runs the shared concern with tracing the economies of this dialectical relationship between the personal voice and the institutional conventions. In certain ways, this concern is also central to the film studies as well and can be an interesting analogy to understand how style becomes the site of this dialectical relationship.
From 1916 to 1960, the style of Hollywood studio system became a norm not just in the US but also across the globe. As a mode of film practice, this style of filmmaking facilitated audiences’ experience of film viewing by foregrounding strong causal links in the narrative chain of events, emphasizing efficient storytelling by leaving everything superfluous out, and aiding the visual experience by techniques like eyeline match and shot/reverse-shot complemented by a suggestive sound design. David Bordwell pointed to the institutional and canonical standard of this style by calling it Classical Hollywood Cinema. Individual film directors increasingly saw the institutional demands of this kind of cinema as stifling, and steadily resorted to a more personal style which resulted in what we today understand as the auteurist cinema, a mode of film practice which was more reflective of the subjective choices of the ‘auteurs’, as these more ‘independent’ film directors were termed. ‘Auteur’, literally the author, is often seen as the dialectical other of any classical filmmaker, though these are not the mutually exclusive categories, and only refer to the two pole positions. The best visual texts in recent memory have resulted from productive exchanges between these two discursive positions.
Keith Rhodes’ argument that the rebranding or reframing of the style requires a fresh approach to writing, an approach that is sensitive to intercultural, international, and interlingual writing appealed to my own concerns about style and writing. My work as a consultant at the writing center has made my approach to appreciating writing samples of undergraduates more nuanced and sensitive. In this reading response, I have consciously attempted to repeat my focus on the dialectics between the personal voice and the institutional requirements to position my argument in line with Rhodes, Carlo, and Greer to contend that writing pedagogy can only benefit from more inclusive and nuanced approaches to academic writing. These approaches are already evolving because of the technological, and demographic, changes in the practice of ‘writing’.
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