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Style as Option

1980; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/356375

1939-9006

Jane R. Walpole,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

Style in composition class is difference between a B paper and an A. It is je ne sais quoi that a teacher recognizes and responds to, but can't define. It is will-o'-the-wisp of rhetoric, obvious but elusive. Yet if we feel it, it must exist. And if it exists, it must have traits that we can talk about. Why are we tongue-tied? Perhaps writing instructor is too aware of literary style, with all its treacherous philosophical cruxes. We no longer feel comfortable viewing style as dress of discourse, external and changeable garb for ideas oft thought, but ne'er so well expressed. This belief ended its two-thousand year sway after eighteenth century, and not even Miss Fidditch reaches that far back for her precepts. So either style is the man himself, indivisibly part and parcel with author, or style is meaning, a Crocean nucleus of matter-manner that no critic can put asunder.' For literature, perhaps so. But in composition classroom, as Louis Milic correctly asserts, either of these modern views shackles teacher.2 Only if we consciously and unapologetically revert to classical view can we separate style from both writer and content and hence make useful suggestions about better ways to write. Yet even if we stipulate that we can dissect out style, we have cracked only half nut. ,For what is this entity, quality, essence that we are isolating? Possible answers lie in two other modern definitions of style-style as deviation and style as option. I suggest that both these views have philosophical and practical difficulties, but that only one of them-style as option-offers any potential value as a classroom tool. The currently burgeoning offshoot of linguistics known as stylistics takes position that style is a deviation from language usage. Such a deviation can only be identified against a statistical profile of normal frequency counts. To quote Nils Enkvist, a leading stylistician,