Supplement

Freeborn D. Style Text Analysis and Linguistic Criticism. London, 1996.

1.1. Dictionary definitions of style

Styles of writing are different ways of using our common language by which we identify one writer, or one kind of writing, from another. It would be useful to look at some dictionary definitions to start with, which you can then refer back to if you want to remind yourself of some of the uses of the word style.

The following extracts from the New Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1991) contain those definitions of style which you are likely to find relevant in studying written and spoken language. Some of the quotations which illustrate the different meanings have been printed also. Obsolete meanings are not included. The numbers before each paragraph indicate the different sections of the entry on style in the OED. The original meaning of the word, with its earliest recorded occurrence, was:

1. Stylus, pin, stalk. (An instrument made of metal, bone, etc., having one end sharp-pointed for incising letters on a wax tablet, and the other flat and broad for smoothing the tablet and erasing what is written: = stylus)

‘1387 John of Trevisa Seinte Barnabe his body was founde in a den...with pe gospel of Mathew pat he hadde i-wtite wip his owne stile.’

Activity 1. Read the extracts through and consider their differences. Notice how the original meaning of the word Style has developed and changed.

2. Writing; manner of writing (hence also of speaking).

3. The manner of expression characteristic of a particular writer (hence of an orator), or of a literary group or period; a writer's mode of expression considered in regard to clearness, effectiveness, beauty, and the like.

4. Used for: A good, choice or fine style.

5. Proverbial phrase, the style is the man.

(1624) R. Burton: It is most true, stylus vinim arguit, out stile bewrayes vs.

In generalized sense: Those features of literary composition which belong to form and expression rather than to the substance of the thought or matter expressed. Often used for: Good or fine style.

(1713) Steele: The Rules of Method, and the Propriety of Thought and Stile.

(1749) Chesterfield: Style is the dress of thoughts.

A manner of discourse, or tone of speaking, adopted in addressing others or in ordinary conversation.

(1667-8) Pepys Diary, 23 Feb.: But here talking, he did discourse in this stile: 'We', and 'We' all along, 'will not give any money’.

6. Manner, fashion.

In generalized sense. Often used for: Beauty or loftiness of style.

Notice that some of these definitions make a distinction between the form or manner or mode of expression and the content, message, or substance of thought. The idea that 'style is the dress of thoughts' has been disputed, on the grounds that thought and expression are inseparable.

1.2. Style in literary criticism and reviews of books

The study of English Literature is principally concerned with evaluation, appreciation and personal response. The aims of the English Literature syllabus of one Examinations and Assessment Board are:

To present the subject as a discipline that is humane (concerned with values), historical (setting literary works within the context of their age) and communicative (concerned, that is, with the integrity of language as a means of enabling human beings to convey their thoughts and feelings one to another).

(Northern Examinations and Assessment Board syllabus for 1994)

In assessing the value of a piece of writing, whether it is good of its kind or not, it is essential that we produce some evidence for our judgment. Among other things, we evaluate its style. One common practice of reviewers and students of literature we can call subjective or impressionistic - an appeal to the impression that the writing makes on the reviewer by finding descriptive words and phrases which attempt to match or reproduce this impression. Let us look at a few examples of the way in which judgments on a variety of different texts are made within the academic study of English Literature and by literary reviewers of books.

1.2.1. “The common pursuit of true judgement”

F.R.Leavis (1895-1978) was a Cambridge academic and literary critic who had a great influence, from the 1930s onwards, on the way that English Literature has been taught in universities and schools. He believed that the business of students of literature and literary critics was “the common pursuit of true judgment”. This point of view has come down into classrooms, for example in lessons where pupils are asked to judge which of two poems or passages of prose is “the better”.

But though you will find plenty of positive judgments in F. R.Leavis's criticism, there is little analysis of the language of authors. For example, in D.H.Lawrence: Novelist (1955), chapter 3, on The Rainbow, he quotes two paragraphs from the beginning of the novel. Leavis is establishing his judgment that D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930) belongs to “the same tradition of art” as the nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot (1819-80) by first of all saying that “George Eliot doesn't write this kind of prose”. He continues: Lawrence is not indulging in descriptive “lyricism”, or writing poetically in order to generate atmosphere. Words here are used in the way, not of eloquence, but of creative poetry (a wholly different way, that is, from that of O may I join the choir invisible): they establish as an actual presence - create as part of the substance of the book - something that is essential to Lawrence's theme. The kind of intense apprehension of the unity of life that they evidence is as decidedly not in George Eliot's genius as it is of Lawrence's.

“O may I join the choir invisible” is a poem by George Eliot.

Students of literature are left to infer from the text what it is that produces an intense apprehension of the unity of life. A stylistic study of the text is an attempt to find out how this effect is produced.

1.2.2. On Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues

The following paragraph is part of a review of an edition of Browning's verse:

No reader of poetry could scan more than a few lines of any of them without knowing that they are by Robert Browning. The energetic rhythms and hectic vocabulary, as much as the finely calibrated moral scales in which each assertion is weighed, are unmistakeable; even the lapses - the occasional grisly rhyme and the jovial embellishments - give the game away.

(Robert Winder, 'Browning's “Dramatic Monologues'”, Folio Society quarterly magazine Summer, 1991, pp. 4, 8)

The phrases energetic rhythms, hectic vocabulary, grisly rhyme, jovial embel­lishments and, elsewhere, the capriciousness of Browning's grammar are used to describe Browning's style. But how do you recognise and agree on aspects of a writer’s work that are called energetic, hectic, grisly, jovial or capricious? What are the specific features of the language - vocabulary, syntax, phonology - by which energy or capriciousness can be recognized? Notice also that some of these features (grisly rhyme and jovial embellishments) are called lapses, that is, they fall short of some notional standards or verse writing.