Writing

1. Make up an outline of the article.

2. Compress the information and write a précis of it.

3. Write an annotation of the article.

4. Expand on one of the following topics

1. Television violence does not directly influence members of the public to commit crimes.

2. Screen violence is harmful to young viewers.

3. Gratuitous violence should be censored.

Text 8

The domain of style

J.N. Leech, M. H. Short

1. In its most general interpretation, the word STYLE has a fairly uncontroversial meaning: it refers to the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on. To clarify this, we may adopt the Swiss linguist Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, langue being the code or system of rules common to speakers of a language (such as English), and parole being the particular uses of this system, or selections from this system, that speakers or writers make on this or that occasion. One may say, for example, that certain English expressions belong to the official style of weather forecasting (bright intervals, scattered showers, etc.), while other expressions (lovely day, a bit chilly, etc.) belong to the style of everyday conversational remarks about the weather. Style, then, pertains to parole: it is selection from a total linguistic repertoire that constitutes a style. This definition does not take us very far, however. In what follows, we shall narrow the scope of the term to something more adapted to the present purpose.

2. In practice, writers on style have differed a great deal in their understanding of the subject, and one source of disagreement has been the question “To what or whom do we attribute style?” In the broadest sense, STYLE can be applied to both spoken and written, both literary and non-literary varieties of language; but by tradition, it is particularly associated with written literary texts, and this is the sense of the term which will concern us.

3. Within the field of literary writing, there is again scope for varying definition and emphasis. Sometimes the term has been applied to the linguistic habits of a particular writer (the style of Dickens, of Proust, etc.); at other times it has been applied to the way language is used in a particular genre, period, school of writing, or some combination of these: epistolary style, early eighteenth-century style, euphemistic style, the style of Victorian novels, etc. All these uses seem natural and serviceable. It would be artificial to limit our understanding of style to one of them, let us say authorial style, and exclude the others. The only assumption one makes in using such expressions is that in the corpus of writings referred to there are some characteristic uses of language, which are capable of abstraction as a style.

4. Style is a relational term: we talk about the style of x, referring through style to characteristics of language use, and correlating these with some extralinguistic x, which we may call the stylistic DOMAIN. The x (writer, period, etc.) defines some corpus of writings in which the characteristics of language use are to be found. But the more extensive and varied the corpus of writings, the more difficult it is to identify a common set of linguistic habits. This applies even to the concept of authorial style. Traditionally, an intimate connection has been seen between style and an author’s personality. This is urged by the Latin tag Stilus virum arguit (The style proclaims the man) and by many later studies and definitions. For that matter, all of us are familiar with the experience of trying, and perhaps managing, to guess the author of a piece of writing simply on the evidence of his language. Sometimes the author’s identity is given away by some small detail reflecting a habit of expression or thought, and this seems to confirm that each writer has a linguistic thumb-print, an individual combination of linguistic habits which somehow betrays him in all that he writes. But the distinctiveness of personal style can be overemphasized. Even with a writer like Samuel Johnson, who seems to stamp his personality on all that he writes, there is a vast difference between the didactic and expository prose of the essays in The Rambler, the simpler narrative prose of much of Rasselas, and the more informal discursiveness of the private letters. If it is difficult to generalize about the style of an author, how much more difficult may it be to generalize about the style of a genre or an epoch. The more general the domain, the more general, selective and tentative are the statements about its style.

4. This brings us to the most specific domain of style, and the one which will be the main focus of this book: we shall be concerned primarily with the style of TEXTS. A text, whether considered as a whole work or as an extract from a work, is the nearest we can get to a homogeneous and specific use of language. It is therefore the natural starting place for the study of style. In a text we can study style in more detail, and with more systematic attention to what words or structures are chosen in preference to others. We can exhibit our material on the page, and examine the interrelations between one choice of language and another. We can thus put our study on a firmer basis of observation and evidence than if we took a broader domain. Of course, it is natural to examine a text in the light of what we know of ambient domains  its author, the period in which it was written, and so on  and to regard it as exemplifying or representing something of more general interest. But it is arguable that the soundness of statements about wider matters such as authorial style relies ultimately on the statements we can make about particular texts. So if we think of style as ‘the linguistic characteristics of a particular text’, we shall be on the safest ground.

Dickens, Charles John Huffham (1812-1870) — English novelist.

Proust, Marcel (1871-1922) — French novelist and critic.

Johnson, Samuel (known as Dr. Johnson) 1709-1784 — English lexicographer, critic, author.

“The Rambler”  a twice-weekly periodical issued by Dr. Johnson in 1750-1752.

“Russels, The History of Prime of Abyssinia” — a didactic romance by Dr. Johnson, published in 1759.

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