About Us, About this Project

We’re students in a fall 2016 rhetoric course–"Intro to Rhetoric: Theory and Practice" (ENGL 4551/5551)–at Tennessee Tech University. This writing project is designed to help writers sharpen their understanding of stylistic concepts, their rhetorical adaptability, and their creativity. For this project, each writer composed a brief, original, realistic story and a dozen or so stylistic variations–some modeled after Raymond Queneau’s 1958 book, Exercises in Style, some inspired by Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story, some based on rhetorical concepts defined in Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, and some invented by the writers themselves. Variations include alternative points of view, genres, technical formal features, chronologies, emphases, tropes, and rhetorical situations--from haiku to a police report. Each writer’s set of narratives includes the basic or original Narrative Template first, followed by other versions titled with descriptive titles.

Each variation is published as a single blog entry, and it's linked to other variations through its tags or labels. To navigate the site, begin by selecting a LABEL (from the menu at right). If you navigate chronologically with the Archive, you'll likely encounter a jumbled mix of project fragments, which will likely be a confusing way to read these texts.

We invite you to read, enjoy, and offer comments. Thanks for visiting!

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[Students' projects from a previous version of this course (spring 2014): https://rhetoricalstyles.wordpress.com//.] 

Speech 3000-CMC Project Introduction

Hello all,




My name is Leah Derryberry and I am a student at Tennessee Tech and plan on graduating this coming May with a degree in Communication with a concentration in Speech. For those of you who are unaware of the Communication department, I highly recommend to give this major a chance.
Communication is a great major to become involved in. The classes are challenging, yet interesting, and the career fields for this degree are very broad and offers plenty of opportunity before after graduation. For the Communication degree, I am taking an online class called Speech 3000 and we are currently working on a Project Proposal Assignment. For this assignment, I am planning on writing 8 different blogs on this website in hopes of either encouraging or inspiring others to gain self-confidence in more ways than one. I take high interest to reach out to those who deal with self-esteem issues and do not believe in themselves as well as they need to. Each blog with include uplifting words, my best advice that has worked for myself from my own past experiences, and a variety of topics to assist in a boost in loving one's self. Social media will be one of the topics in relation to self-confidence, but I have yet to determine the exact content I'm going to discuss, however, I am aware of the overall topic for this assignment, which is self-confidence as I just mentioned. As far as the target audience is concerned, I am wanting to reach out to the millennial generation, which is my own generation. The reason being is because I feel as if social media plays a major role in our generation. We are constantly on our phones and updating our social media accounts, which has caused me to lack self-confidence because I once found myself comparing my life to others through the use of social media. I am hoping to reach out to my audience by notifying my peers about my blog posts through social media, and other types of communication. Not only is my end goal to earn a good grade for this project, I am striving for genuine help and advice through my past experiences and examples that I am going to provide for everyone.




I am looking forward to beginning this fun and exciting project, and I would love to hear feedback from my audience. I'm eager to get started and see where this project takes myself and others along for the ride.






With love,






Leah Derryberry