Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition

1. Introduction

1 1 Introduction Most books on style concentrate on either how to analyze prose or how to improve your own writing style. Performing Prose blends the two concentrations. It equips you with a vocabulary for analyzing prose style while making you more aware of the choices available as you plan and write sentences, paragraphs, and papers. We contend that analysis and performance are complementary and mutually reinforcing: analysis feeds performance, and performance feeds analysis. When you analyze a sample of writing, you identify its various verbal devices and interpret their effects. By explicitly articulating what these devices are and how they operate, you make them available in your own writing repertoire where you can draw upon them and fashion them for fresh purposes. Practice in writing will, in turn, enhance your powers of analysis. By experiencing the writing process from the inside—as a participant with the awareness of an analyst—you increase your sensitivities to the challenges that writers face and the options they have. You learn to question an author’s choices in light of how you might have composed a different kind of sentence or chosen a different word. Toward achieving these two goals—insightful analysis and better writing —consider three interrelated terms describing different levels of written prose: grammar, style, and performance. These terms are difficult to pin down because they have been defined in so many ways, and there is some overlap, yet the following will serve as workable definitions: +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 2 / Introduction • Grammar is the set of rules by which a language functions. • Style comprises the choices a writer makes within that system. • Performance is the moment when language goes into action, when the writer puts the stylistic repertoire to use with a rhetorical awareness of audience and context. As the system of rules by which language functions, grammar allows writers to assemble sequences of words into meaningful combinations: “The cat is on the mat,” but not “Mat the on is cat the.” Children begin internalizing these rules at an early age, and by the time most begin formal schooling, they are able to produce hundreds of utterances that are grammatical. By the time they are young adults, their knowledge of the language has increased exponentially. The problem, from the perspective of stylistic analysis and performance, is that much of this knowledge is intuitive. Young adults may be able to produce thousands of grammatical utterances, but they may not be able to articulate why they are grammatical . Although we assume in our readers a rudimentary command of grammatical terms and concepts, we’ve provided an overview of English grammar in the appendix in case you need a quick introduction or review. Our aim in the main chapters is to build upon grammatical knowledge to create a strong sense of style and performance. The big difference between grammar and style is that while grammar involves compliance, style depends upon a writer’s decision making. Identifying style with choice implies that there are different ways of saying the same thing. To put it more abstractly, it implies that meaning is somehow independent of style, that there are meanings held in the mind or out there somewhere that can be realized in multiple ways. Such a proposition holds only in a general sense and ignores an important fact about language: any change in the manner of expression will have consequences for the meanings expressed. Linguists Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short capture this aspect of language (and avoid the pitfalls of assuming that content and form are independent) by distinguishing between stylistic variant and stylistic value. Stylistic variant refers to alternate expressions for roughly the same thing, while stylistic value refers to the consequences (what is gained and lost) by choosing one alternate over another. Consider the following sentences (adapted from Leech and Short 34): 1. After dinner, the senator made a speech. 2. When dinner was over, the senator made a speech. +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 Introduction / 3 3. When dinner was over, a speech was made by the senator. 4. The senator delivered a postprandial oration. All of these are stylistic variants, but they differ in the stylistic values they communicate. The difference between 1 and 2 is negligible, although 2 may sound slightly more emphatic because it begins with a full clause (“When dinner was over”) rather than a prepositional phrase (“After dinner ”). The difference between 2 and 3 is...