Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition

2. Motives of Style

17 2 Motives of Style The previous chapter took Heimel’s “fantasy” passage through the textual , social, and cultural arenas, detailing various verbal features and interpreting their effects. The goal of that exercise was threefold: • To present a framework for examining writing as performance: writing is a dynamic process, a series of interactions among textual features, writers and readers, and the cultural contexts they inhabit. • To model stylistic analysis: one way to learn how to do analysis is through imitation—that is, by studying the methods and practices of other analysts of style. • To make certain stylistic strategies visible so that you might add them to your own writing repertoire: for instance, using syntactic inversion to move an important word, such as “snaked,” into a position of stress. This chapter moves you closer toward these goals. It does so by giving you insider knowledge of the motives that often drive analysis and performance. Each motive offers a general strategy—a line of argument, so to speak— that allows you, when analyzing others’ work or considering your own options , to move from stylistic description (“This is a metaphor”) to stylistic interpretation (“This is how the metaphor may function”). This move is +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 18 / Motives of Style crucial. Too often students of style complete the first step (they describe or identify a stylistic feature) and think their work is done. It’s not. You need to push beyond description and interpret how a stylistic feature functions in context. The motives of style will help you bridge this all too common gap between description and understanding. Although we feature the term “motive” throughout this chapter, we are not interested in recovering the intent of an author—in fact, we believe that intent is ultimately inaccessible, even to authors themselves. Instead, we survey the various ways writers and analysts explain stylistic behaviors to either themselves or others. Typically, these explanations will name, or at least imply, an orientation toward one of the elements of the rhetorical situation: language, subject matter, writer, or reader. All of these elements are at play in every stylistic decision, but as we suggested in chapter 1, any specific choice may focus on one more than others. Accordingly, we will use them to organize our discussion of the stylistic motives. Motives Focused on Language Language-focused motives emerge from the linguistic code itself and include the meanings and functions we conventionally associate with word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on) and phrase and clause types. Of all the motives we survey in this chapter, these are the most specific in focus, requiring us to examine the word-by-word decisions a writer makes and the reasons that might inform those decisions. These motives are also the most varied and numerous. As a result, we can only provide a sampling here. Let’s start with a very familiar word class, definite and indefinite articles : “the,” “a,” and “an.” Although articles can serve a number of functions , one of their most important is to tag a piece of information as new or already known to readers. Consider these three sentences from Alice Munro’s short story “The Moons of Jupiter”: A small screen hung over his head. On the screen a bright jagged line was continually being written. The writing was accompanied by a nervous electronic beeping. (Selected Stories 307) In the first sentence, the indefinite article “a” tags the “small screen” as information that is new to the reader. Once Munro mentions “screen,” however, it becomes known information, and she labels it as such in the second sentence with the definite article “the.” Similarly, Munro presents “bright jagged line” as new information, but when she refers to it again in sentence three, she tags it as known: “The writing.” +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 Motives of Style / 19 The choice of definite and indefinite articles may seem a small matter, hardly worthy of note: use definite articles when readers are already familiar with a piece of information; use indefinite articles when they are not. Most native writers perform this action almost automatically. A skilled stylist, however, can play on this linguistic convention to create interesting effects. For instance, writers of modern literature (including literary nonfiction) often use definite articles, among other devices, at the beginnings of narratives to create the illusion that readers already share knowledge of the world they are about to enter (Traugott and...