| About This Section...
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Cascading style sheets can help you to teach style rhetorically. The "cascade" in CSS alludes to a principle of local control built into the CSS standard which you can use to demonstrate, quite literally, how style conventions can exist as high-level expectations which can be adhered to, ignored, or overridden locally, at the level of an individual text or even an element within a text.
This can be a tough concept to teach in the abstract. But CSS gives you a way to allow students to inductively discover both the logic and politics of making stylistic choices.
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| Cascading Style Sheets Can Help You to Teach the Rhetoric of Style
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Using CSS
In this section, we focus on how to use Cascading Style Sheets. We suggest that you can not only use these as a practical tool, but also as a way to teach your students about the rhetorical nature of "style."
To demonstrate how CSS works, we will first walk you through the process of creating a style sheet appropriate for a course web site or syllabus. In order to do this, you may want to have a course web site of your own handy. Go ahead and pull it up in another window or bookmark it now. Or, if you prefer, you can take a look at one of my current course pages.
Teaching Style with CSS
After we get you up to speed with your own style sheet, we'll talk about an assignment you might try in your writing course using style sheets: a distributed publishing project. In this project, students create a web 'zine (online magazine). In order to create the consistent look and feel associated with any magazine, the class will have to decide upon a common set of styles to adhere to. Defining these styles is easy enough in CSS, as you'll soon see. The tricky part comes in deciding just what elements each article in the 'zine is made up of, what to call these elements, and how they should appear on the screen. Writing an article for the 'zine becomes an exercise in making style choices and balancing the conventions of the group with the individual needs of each writer and article.
Who am I?
I am Bill Hart-Davidson. I teach a variety of courses in writing, technical communication, and human-computer interaction at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I teach the distributed publishing project in courses like Advanced Content Development for the WWW and Writing to the WWW. Drop me a line if I can help out!
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