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Elements of Style
The following are some basic elements of style that we examine in order to characterize an author’s writing.
DICTION. Although words are usually meaningful only in the context of other words, stylistic analysis begins with the attempt to identify and understand the type and quality of the individual words that comprise an author’s basic vocabulary. When used in connection with characterization, words are the vehicles by which a character’s ideas, attitudes and values are expressed. Words convey the details of outer appearance and inner state of mind. In dialogue they reflect the speaker’s intelligence and sophistication, general level of conscious awareness, and socioeconomic, geographical and educational background. When used to describe incidents, words help to convey the narrator’s (or author’s) attitude to those events and the characters involved in them. When used to describe setting, words help to create and sustain an appropriate atmosphere.
The analysis of diction includes the following considerations: the denotative (or dictionary) meaning of words, as opposed to their connotative meaning (the ideas associated with or suggested by them); their degree of concreteness or abstractness; their degree of allusiveness; the parts of speech they represent; their length and construction; the level of usage they reflect (standard or nonstandard; formal, informal, or colloquial); the imagery (details of sensory experience) they contain; the figurative devices (simile, metaphor, personification) they embody; their rhythm and sound patterns (alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia). In studying diction, we also need to pay close attention to the use of repetition: the way key words recur in a given passage or series of passages in such a way as to call special attention to themselves.
SYNTAX. When we examine style at the level of syntax, we are attempting to analyze the ways the author arranges words into phrases, clauses, and finally whole sentences to achieve particular effects. Although syntax is determined partly by lexical content (or meaning) of the words and partly by basic grammatical structure of the language, every writer enjoys considerable freedom to shape and control the syntactic elements of style. In looking at the author’s syntax we want to know how the words have been arranged and particularly how they deviate from the normal and expected.
Although one can study syntactic units smaller than the sentence – for example, individual phrases that can call attention themselves by their length, construction and placement – syntax is probably most easily approached and analyzed in sentences. Such an approach mirrors most closely the writing process itself, for sentences are the major units of thought, and it is on the crafting of sentences that most authors concentrate their creative energies. Sentences can be examined in terms of their length – whether they are short, spare and economical, or long and involved; in terms of their form – whether they are simple, compound, or complex; and in terms of their construction – whether they are loose (sentences that flow the normal subject-verb-object pattern, stating their main idea near the beginning in the form of an independent clause), periodic (sentences that deliberately withhold or suspend the completion of the main idea until the end of the sentence), or balanced (sentences in which two similar or antithetical ideas are balanced).
Each type of sentence will have a slightly different effect on the reader. Long, complicated sentences slow down and retard the pace of a narrative, whereas short, simple sentences hasten it. Loose sentences, because they follow the normal, predictable patterns of speech, tend to appear more natural and less contrived than either periodic or balanced sentences, particularly when they are used in the creation of dialogue. Moreover, the deliberate arrangement of words within individual sentences or groups of sentences can result in patterns of rhythm and sound (pleasant or unpleasant) that establish or reinforce feeling and emotion. Although an author will usually vary the kinds of sentences used in order to avoid monotony (unless monotony is intended), certain syntactic patternswill dominate and become characteristic of that author’s style.
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