The Importance of Style

I believe we are living in an age without style, virtue, dignity or honor. And worse than that, one in which the new is equated with the excellent…. I believe that a creator’s obligation is to filter and reflect and present in an orderly, disciplined fashion his own being. (italics mine)

Alec Wider, Letters I Never Mailed

As a developmental English instructor, I sometimes feel that the first half of Wider’s quote is accurate, but thankfully my classroom is rarely that bleak. However, his “creator’s obligation” assertion establishes a pliable framework from which to teach students how to develop and control a style of their own creation. We need for our students to understand that the style they create should be within their own control, but initially they cannot create what they do not comprehend. I purposefully chose the word “comprehend” here as I consider style a very individual and malleable entity that shifts and conforms to individual originators and their audiences; it is not a static skill to be mindlessly drilled and practiced until “mastery” is achieved. Students need a framework which acts both as a safety net and a springboard from which to leap to experiment with a variety of expressions. This allows for scaffolding, which can be constructed in various shapes, to present their ideas to their audience. Style, then, becomes a trademark of a writer’s individuality and is achieved through the successful delivery of a carefully crafted plan to specific audiences through the use of selected grammatical and rhetorical tools.

Style is not a static, private skill created and posted for the world to see. For style to have any importance to writers, we must first have formulated thoughts about something important enough for us to desire to share and affect some sort of connection with an audience. So, the first step to creating our own style is to sort out our ideas, decide what content is important, and create a framework from which to pull and sort those ideas.

Writers with the most effective sense of style are able to accomplish this through the evaluation of their audience. Who have we selected to deliver the message? What background information do they already possess, and what gaps must we fill? Even personal journal writing establishes an audience between the solitary “writers,” past and present. In The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne carries on one such conversation with herself as she relates a decision, aided by her conversation with herself within her text:

I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments. (Frank)

Through previous written conversations with herself, Anne demonstrates that what many students perceive as a solitary act is actually discourse, a conversation in which she engages to sort out her thoughts and beliefs.
In journal writing, audience and discourse may be easier to ascertain, but when addressing an external audience, assessing background knowledge becomes a trickier test. The most common error writers make is to give their audiences more credit than they deserve. As Benjamin Franklin is quoted in Williams’ Style (2007):

If he would inform, he must advance regularly form Things know to things unknown, distinctly without Confusion, and the lower he begins the better. It is a common Fault in Writers, to allow their Readers too much knowledge: They begin with that which should be in the Middle. . . . (p.74).

Student writers frequently make faulty assumptions in which they expect their reader to have a background and familiarity with the subject similar to their own. The inability to see the void between the audience and the subject at hand results from their own intimate relationship with the material. Encouraging students to “question” themselves as they write helps them to anticipate additional information the reader may need to make the necessary connections from the writer’s ideas to the audience’s comprehension. So another necessary aspect of style is the understanding that the selection of content must anticipate the discourse between the creator and the audience.

Next, we must devise a plan which relates our thoughts effectively to our audience. In consideration of this task, we must address both correctness and clarity. For burgeoning writers, these concepts can be difficult to balance. Correctness is a touchy characteristic, which given its overwhelming authority in most classrooms, has given it a bad name. However, correctness does have a place in defining good writing style—if kept in its place—and students need to be aware of the rules that govern their given or chosen writing environment. Before we can express style by deviating from whatever norm our audience anticipates, we must first know the norms of the community. Knowing the boundaries of what the audience considers good writing lends to both our confidence and authority as writers. Good writers who demonstrate any intentional style apply the rules of grammar—subject/verb agreement, pronoun/antecedent agreement, semi-colons—correctly which helps to demonstrate both our confidence and competence in our abilities and our knowledge of form.

But intentional deviation from some rules, the invented rules as Williams (p. 12) refers to them, does not violate any sense of good style in most audiences. We choose what form, what rules or shape, works best for the content we choose to relate, and splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence in a preposition may add more effect and deliver the material more clearly than the “correct” version of the sentence. An excerpt from William’s “Phenomenology” (1981) illustrates this point: “It may be that to fully account for the contempt that some errors of usage around, we will have to understand better than we do the relationship between language, order, and those deep psychic forces that perceived linguistic violations seem to arouse in otherwise amiable people” (p. 153). Although Williams uses the split infinitive intentionally is this article, he does this to prove the point that many, if not most readers will “miss” or “overlook” the error because they are engaged in the content—not the correctness. The difference between writers with good style and poor style though is this intentionality. Good writers choose to bend or ignore a rule when it impedes the delivery of their content.

Clarity, however, can soften the potential rigidness of correctness, but recognizing and teaching clarity has been a challenge since Aristotle’s time. He defines good prose as the following: “Let the virtue of linguistic form be defined as being clear, for since the logos is a sign, it would fail to bring about its proper function, whenever it does not make clear (whatever it is the sign of, sc.)—and neither banal/mean/flat nor above the deserved dignity, but appropriate” (Rhet. III.2, 1404b1-4, in Stanford). Aristotle, then, believed that good prose was neither “banal” nor “above the deserved dignity, but appropriate.” Simple. Maybe for Aristotle and Plato, but their attempt to create a neutral environment for communication then and today is untenable. Writing is always charged somehow because no matter what we say, our choices in content, audience, correctness, and clarity are made with a purpose.

Although this reflection on style may seem too structured to some, that the creator makes a conscious choice concerning structure is the ultimate outcome—control is ultimately in the hands of the writer. Lanham (2007) states that prose style is best when it is generated internally, when it “provides the students with a gyroscope, a compass, a map of human motive, rather than a totally planned guided tour” (p. 8). For most students, a “guided tour” is a necessary starting point. Once they discover important landmarks, however, they take side trips, both planned and unplanned based on their own interests and talents, trying different venues in which to express themselves.

For students to develop a style that will be meaningful and effective for them, they must take an active role in its creation. We, as instructors, are responsible for providing the basis from which students can make their choices, but the iterative process of planning, selecting, reflecting, and finally presenting takes a considerable amount of perseverance on the student’s part. The payoff, though, offers a style and expression all their own.