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Most people simply don’t pay attention to words. They use words as if their sounds were inaudible, their shapes were invisible, and their meanings were single and selfevident. One goal of this chapter is to interest you in words themselves—as things with particular qualities, complex histories, and varied shades of meaning.

STYLE: THE BASICS

Style is not merely decorative.

Simplicity does not necessarily equal clarity.

A matter of words is always a matter of meaning.

STYLE IS MEANING

A key concept throughout this unit is that style is not merely decorative. It is often mistakenly assumed that style is separate from meaning and in that sense largely cosmetic. From this perspective, paying close attention to style seems finicky, or worse, cynical—a way of dressing up the content to sell it to readers or listeners. The problem with this perspective is that it subscribes to what we have earlier referred to as the transparent theory of language. This is the idea that meaning exists outside of language—that we somehow see through words to meaning and can then address that meaning without addressing the words that embody it. In the transparent theory of language, words are merely pointers to get past.

Another key concept of this unit is that simplicity does not necessarily equal clarity. This chapter targets the unexamined cultural bias in favor of “straight talk.” The assumption seems to be that people who use too many words, especially big ones, are needlessly complicating what would otherwise be obvious to anyone’s common sense. Not so. (Those imperious arbiters of style, Strunk and White, are sometimes correct when they say in The Elements of Style—“Never use six words when three will do”—but not always.) Strunk and White also say, for example, never to use the “not un-” formation. So they summarily rule that it is always better to say “I am happy” rather than “I am not unhappy.” The second sentence, however, does not mean the same thing as the first. The difference is not just a matter of words but of meaning. This chapter seeks to persuade you that a matter of words is always a matter of meaning.

STYLE: A MATTER OF CHOICES

And what is style? Well, it’s not just icing on the cake—cosmetic, a matter of polishing the surface. Broadly defined, style refers to all of a writer’s decisions in selecting, arranging, and expressing what he or she has to say. Many factors affect your style: your aim and sense of audience, the ways you approach and develop a topic, the kinds of evidence you choose, and, particularly, the kinds of syntax (word order) and diction (word choice) you characteristically select.

In this sense, style is personal. The foundations of your style emerge in the dialogue you have with yourself about your topic. When you revise for style, you consciously reorient yourself toward communicating the results of that dialogue to your audience. Stylistic decisions, then, are a mix of the unconscious and conscious, of chance and choice. You don’t simply impose style onto your prose; it’s not a mask you don or your way of icing the cake. Revising for style is more like sculpting. As a sculptor uses a chisel to “bring out” a shape from a block of walnut or marble, a writer uses style to bring out the shape of the conceptual connections in a draft of an essay. This bringing out demands a certain detachment from your own language. It requires that you become aware of your words as words and of your sentences as sentences.

You may have been taught that you should always avoid the first-person I in academic writing, steer clear of jargon, and never start a sentence with and or but. There are occasions when all three rules, and others like them, should be rejected. These are matters of usage, not hard-and-fast rules of grammar. This chapter seeks to persuade you that all writing is contextual, its appropriateness dependent on the rhetorical situation.

It is commonly assumed that “getting the style right” is a task that begins