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Scholars in composition know that the ideas about writing most common in the discourse of public intellectuals are egregiously backward. Without a vital approach to stylistics, Butler argues, writing studies will never dislodge the controlling fantasies of self-authorized pundits in the nation’s intellectual press. Rhetoric and composition must answer with a public discourse that is responsive to readers’ ongoing interest in style but is also grounded in composition theory.
Frank Farmer
Conger-Gabel Professor of English
University of Kansas
[Butler] argues that a reanimation of style would not only help form better writing, but would also reanimate invention. And in the process he reinvigorates a history that is dynamic, a Golden Age of Comp. . . . A consciousness of style, of learning about, developing an affinity for, and teaching style will give us a way to counter public arguments against what we do, for we are constantly criticized. . . . This is a call for us to be stylin in public discourse.
Victor Villanueva
Chair of English, Auburn University
College Composition and Communication, 62.4
Chapter two, “Historical Developments: Relevant Stylistic History and Theory,” is an especially important chapter for everyone—yes, everyone—in composition studies to read.
--Rhetoric Review
The way Butler listens to his own sentences here, engaging us in the unfolding of his words and making us sense how time opens up as language is sounded out, brightens our minds, promising us time to languish in the pleasures of style. Butler’s opening moves—from recalling himself as a poetry lover, to recounting Richard Ohmann’s definition of style as “a way of writing” (qtd. in Butler 2), to raising what he takes to be the canonical questions and positions in the study of style—are also carefully crafted, dynamic, and enveloping. (270)
Butler’s genius in the [fifth] chapter lies in his conceptualization of causes: why compositionists do not speak for writing or get heard in public. (272)
Paul Butler’s Out of Style does not endorse conventional wisdom. Instead, Butler offers us the more interesting claim that “style is not the product-based residue of current-traditional rhetoric that many say it is [. . .], but rather is a dynamic feature of the very process movement the field considers crucial to its disciplinary identity” (269).
--College English