4 - Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
It is not surprising that we call each other names: those of us who question the value of grammar are in fact shaking the whole elaborate edifice of traditional composition instruction.
Patrick Hartwell, “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” (109)A student sentence is an economy in miniature. It has an actor, an action, an object of that action. It is a transaction, a completed act. It is self-interested in that it seeks a good grade, seeks to demonstrate mastery of the assignment. But it also seeks to express something; it is a learner's exercise in how to trade in the market of ideas. When it is good, the writing rejoices in that exchange. There is, in any utterance, however self-interested, a residual urge to share a view of life. To see the world a certain way and to want other people to enjoy seeing it that way too. This two-way communication, self-seeking and other-seeking, is after all what makes markets fun to go to and full of life.
Richard Lanham, Economics of Attention (266)AUDIENCE
What is style? Consider these four requests:
(a) “Close the door.”
(b) “For God's sake, will you close the dadgum door?!”
(c) “Would you please be so kind as to close the door?”
(d) “The lid on the casket holding our relationship is that door, which you now must shut.”
In a famous essay in 1965, “Theories of Style and Their Implications for the Teaching of Composition,” the linguist Louis Milic distinguishes three different ways to think about style.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rhetoric and CompositionAn Introduction, pp. 140 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010