What a writing major does

My god I love Google image search.

Sometimes I have a hard time describing my graduate program to people.

"I'm studying writing and publishing," I tell them.

"Like books?" they ask.

"Well...yeah, sort of. Like, I have writing workshops on things like memoir and revision, and I study grammar and education theory and stuff too."

It's surprisingly vague and hard to explain, and it actually took me a full year of classes to understand what I was really in grad school for. It's not unusual for me to not really grasp the full extent of the syllabus until eight weeks into the ten-week class, and that's fine because it presents me with a series of satisfying "Eureka!" moments on a regular basis.

Now I've only got four classes left to go before getting my MA. One of those classes -- "Language and Style for Writers" -- I began yesterday in an intense 5-week summer session. (Quarters are normally ten weeks.) My next class is tomorrow -- "week two," if you will -- and I again find myself staring at four chapters of reading from the most vaguely titled textbook I've ever seen in my life: Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects (6th edition, natch).

But I'm a few pages into the introduction -- which, I will add, was not actually assigned reading but I decided to read anyway because it might give me a clue as to what the class is really about -- and I'm intrigued enough to procrastinate a bit with a blog post.

What caught my eye was the definition the authors offer for the title phrase "rhetorical grammar," which is basically the choices a writer makes regarding audience, purpose, and topic. The authors use an example of the difference between writing a text message to a friend and writing a formal fundraising request to the university dean. Each format has its own conventions, from spelling to sentence structure to punctuation to emoticon usage, and each audience has certain expectations. Those grammatical choices, particularly those related to sentence structure, are rhetorical grammar -- and the subject of what I'm studying in class. How to manipulate sentences. Because that, my friends, is what writers do.

And yes, it's past 10pm the night before class and I've paused while reading the introduction to my reading, which is not actually part of the assigned 80 pages, to inform the Internet of just what it is I'm not studying. I'm taking masochistic procrastination to a whole new level here, folks.