Style vs. Non-style Elements of Writing

[Naomasa298]

No, they are not. For the purpose of this thread, I am not referring to genre style.

They're all part of style, so I don't see why it should be separate?

So we're well advised to put the priority on this

Only *after* you have mastered the basics, which is the how.

 

[badgerjelly]

Style is determined by a piece of writing’s structural elements, like word choice, sentence structure, and tone and rhythm.

Non-style elements include its content, substance, and meaning.

According to the ancients, the meaning, substance and content should come first.

As Cato said, “Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” (Rem tene, verba sequentur.) Words come after, not before.

Aristotle initiated the tradition of making language “so transparent a medium that it disappears and interposes no obstacle or screen between the reader and the things it points to.” (Fish, How to Read a Sentence, page 39)

Should it be style over non-style elements, or non-style elements over style? Which one should be favoured? What value does style have?

Not sure if it helps but there is a field of study called Stylistics which is concerned primarily with a broader understanding of linguistics. It is commonly used in literary analysis too, but at the end of the day it is analytic rather than a guiding force. It offer a means to analyse a text objectively.

Stylistics encompases both meaning and structure. They are intertwined. The more recent developments in stylistics has been in how non-fiction is scrutinised with the same tools as fiction--political, marketing etc.,.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Mind you, I generally write in freeverse, which means that you are meant to create the form, as you write, to suit the content. But the other way can work too and some of the best poems I've written were when I decided to focus on a specific form. It can also be quite challenging but if you keep it up you can internalize the form and it becomes a template for meaning.

Very well said. Thanks for that.

 

[Louanne Learning]

They're all part of style, so I don't see why it should be separate?

Well, I wasn't thinking of genre style at all when I made this thread. Only how each individual writer expresses their writing.

I am sorry I wasn't more clear. That's on me.

 

[Naomasa298]

Well, I wasn't thinking of genre style at all when I made this thread. Only how each individual writer expresses their writing.

I am sorry I wasn't more clear. That's on me.

OK. The genre style is not a complete style in itself. Rather, it encompasses baseline elements, like creating tension, the ways to do that (such as by using short sentences and so on) and informs the author's own style - each writer then refines and develops it according to how they want to do it. That's why it forms part of a written style as a whole. Writers will use different styles (and voices) to write in a particular genre, and everyone will do it differently. I could write horror as King, Lovecraft, Dahl or Conan Doyle, for example. Or just as me.

 

[Louanne Learning]

I admit I have a romantic notion of the writing process. I think it best begins with being headstrong – to let your imagination run wild, to examine how you feel about things, to pinpoint what you want to say, to begin with mental work, rather than the grind, to not reigning yourself in, but to go forward in the knowledge that none of your thoughts are mediocre, but original and meaningful, and to shut your eyes and think.
In the words of Mozart:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me, I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments.
All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and denned, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture, a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successfully, but I hear them as it were, gleich alles zusammen, all at once. What a delight that is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the tout ensemble is after all the best.

(Quoted in If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland, page 109)

So, style – construction - comes into play after inspiration. The style of a piece involves taking the following into account:

Put statements in positive form
Do not overstate
Express coordinate ideas in similar form
Keep related words together
Maintain consistency in verb tenses
Place the emphasis at the end
Use active voice
Design
Omit needless words
Revise and rewrite
Use definite language
Avoid fancy words
Avoid the use of qualifiers
Do not explain too much
Follow a chronological order
Sentence length
Use figures of speech sparingly
Use orthodox spelling
Write concisely

The stated aim of a book originally published in 1918 – The Elements of Style – by William Strunk, Jr. (Professor of English in Cornell University) is:

… concentrating attention on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.

Here is its table of contents:

I.​	Introductory	5​
II.​	Elementary Rules of Usage	7​
	1.​	Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's	7​
	2.​	In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last	7​
	3.​	Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas	8​
	4.​	Place a comma before a conjunction introducing a co-ordinate clause	10​
	5.​	Do not join independent clauses by a comma	11​
	6.​	Do not break sentences in two	12​
	7.​	A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject	13​
III.​	Elementary Principles of Composition	15​
	8.​	Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic	15​
	9.​	As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning	17​
	10.​	Use the active voice	19​
	11.​	Put statements in positive form	21​
	12.​	Use definite, specific, concrete language	22​
	13.​	Omit needless words	24​
	14.​	Avoid a succession of loose sentences	25​
	15.​	Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form	26​
	16.​	Keep related words together	28​
	17.​	In summaries, keep to one tense	29​
	18.​	Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end	31​
IV.​	A Few Matters of Form	33​
V.​	Words and Expressions Commonly Misused	36​
VI.​	Spelling

It was in the tradition of Strunk’s definition of style that I opened this thread.

 

[Also]

If someone would rewrite EoS beginning afresh from that outline, it would probably emerge a much better book — for business and other styleless informational writing.

The Elements of Style shines at its brightest in improving business writing, which most often can best benefit from such simplistic proclamations.

But to quote Linda Proud in her essay The Book That Ate America's Brain:

In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, said:
‘The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules . . . It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can’t tell you why.’
Specifically, Prof. Pullum said that Strunk and White misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and criticized their proscribing established usages such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause. He also criticizes The Elements of Style in Language Log, a linguists’ blog about language in popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, referring to it as “the book that ate America’s brain.”
In the Boston Globe newspaper’s review of The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005) edition describes the writing manual as an “aging zombie of a book . . . a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.”

I've certainly seen the EoS-inspired insecurity and misconceptions that Pullum talks about manifest in various critique groups still today.

EoS can arguably improve some mediocre writing, but it can also drag excellent writing down to mediocrity.

It was already ancient when it was imposed on my 12th-grade English class over a half-century ago. The co-teachers did not like when I protested with some of the same observations Pullum would publish decades later, but they couldn't refute them.

Today there are any number of basic books that are more beneficial to writers of fiction or business prose. The first to mind is Anne Stilman's Grammatically Correct [etc], a pleasant, clear, self-consistent and (not least) correct read.

In my estimation, Style emerges only after a writer has achieved fluency, including correctness.

 

[Naomasa298]

business prose

Heh. I just spent the day implementing AI to improve exactly that, at the behest of management. Not something I would choose to do, but orders are orders.