Imitation in Rhetoric and Composition

In rhetoric and composition, students exercise imitation when they read, copy, analyze, and paraphrase the text of a major author. The term is also known (in Latin) as "imitatio." "It is a universal rule of life that we should wish to copy what we approve in others," Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a first-century Roman educator, wrote many centuries ago. Since that time—and throughout the millennia—, imitation has often been the sincerest form of flattery, as the following thoughts from writers and thinkers demonstrate.

Definition

Imitation is not the same as plagiarism, which means claiming someone else's work as your own by putting it in your writing without attribution or credit. With imitation, you are drawing inspiration from an admired author, not rewriting their work and calling it yours.

Here, Zinnser explains that writers practice imitation by studying the voice of authors they admire, not copying their words. No less a literary luminary than the late American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Hemingway has practiced imitation—not only in voice and tone but even in story content. According to a 2019 article by Dalya Alberge in The Guardian:

"New research shows that the themes and style in the writing of Enrique Serpa, a little-known Cuban author, find an echo in the works of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote some of his most notable books while in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. U.S. academic Professor Andrew Feldman said there were strong parallels between Serpa’s stories and later works of Hemingway, including To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea. Although 'not a plagiarism situation,' the stories were 'incredibly similar, a striking resemblance in terms of themes and style.'"

In turn, Hemingway's unique style and voice have influenced generations of writers, who are drawn to his work and become bound to it.

Here, Mendelsohn explains how you, as a writer, imitate an author by "binding" to the way they explain things, the way they approach their writing, and even their passion for their craft. As time goes on and you grow more confident in your writing, the signs of this binding or imitation fade.

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Sentence Imitation in English

By Richard Nordquist

Red Smith on Imitation

Sports is a great analogy for imitation in writing. Writer Red Smith explains how his writing inspirations shaped his style until he developed his own.

Smith himself was a famed sportswriter who influenced countless sportswriters to follow. They imitated him, and he imitated those before him. Smith shows how imitation is like trying on a pair of shoes, seeing how they feel after walking in them, discarding them, and trying on others until you find your own pair—the shoes in this example represent one's voice.

Imitation in Classical Rhetoric

Imitation was a vital part of the development of human knowledge and style.

No knowledge (or writing) is completely new; it builds on the knowledge, style, and writing that came before. Vickers explains that even Renaissance rhetoric—which Merriam-Webster defines as "the art of using words"—hinged on how writers practiced imitation, borrowing liberally from their predecessors.

Imitation in Roman Rhetoric

As far back as Roman times, writers practiced imitation in rhetoric.

Ochs reiterates that imitation is not copying. As far back as Roman times, imitation was a step in the learning process. It represented a systematic approach to helping students find their own inner voices.

Imitation and Originality

Ultimately, the key to imitation—and what sets it apart from plagiarism—is its emphasis on helping new writers and speakers achieve originality in their own works. A student might start out by copying the work of an "admired author," but this was only part of the process of helping them grow as writers.

Here Crowley emphasizes the key point of imitation: "[R]eal skill lay in being able to imitate or to improve on something written by others." She notes how ancient teachers would have found the idea of creating original prose from scratch to be a strange concept. As sportswriter Smith showed in his work during the course of his career, imitation is a way of observing what others who have come before write, and how they write, in order to improve on what they have created and find your own inner voice in the process. Finding originality, you might say, is actually the sincerest form of imitation.

Sources

• Alberge, Dalya. “Did Ernest Hemingway Copy His Friend's Ideas for Cuban Classics?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 May 2019.
• “Watch Hemingway.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, pbs.org.