Technical Aspect: Style in Literary Works

Whenever we talk about any literary work, we generally talk about the style that is used in that piece of work. But what actually is style? Traditionally, style has been defined as the manner of linguistic expression in a verse or a prose.

This manner refers to how a person or rather speakers or writers, say whatever they wish to. We have different writers that have certain style specific to them. This style helps us understand a general trend of the writer.

This factor of style has been analyzed in such diverse terms as the rhetorical situation and aim, the type of sentence structure and syntax, the choice of words, the characteristic diction as well as the kinds and density of figurative language. Since style is what forms the basis of any piece of work, it may be a cause of trouble for students working on their assignments and thus they may require assignment help for the same.

Research paper writing states that the standard theories based on Cicero as well as other rhetoricians, styles were usually classified into three main levels:

1. Grand or high 

2. Mean or middle

3. Plain or low

The doctrine of decorum, which was influential throughout the eighteenth century, required that the style of a particular piece of work be appropriate to the social class of the speaker, to the dignity of its literary genre as well as to the occasion on which it is spoken.

The introduction to the variant of the long persisting analysis of literary work of stylistic levels in literature can be credited to the critic Northrop Frye. He made a distinction between the demotic style and heiratic style.

The former is modeled on language, associations as well as rhythms of ordinary speech as well as the latter employs a variety of formal elaborations that separate the ordinary speech from the literary language. Later, Frye proceeded to distinguish between the high, medium and low level in each of these classes. 

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When we talk of style, two types of sentence structure are distinguished:

1. The periodic sentence is the sentence in which the members or the component parts are so composed that the close of its syntactic structure remains suspended till the conclusion of the sentence. The effect may tend to be formal or oratorical. The opening sentence of Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell can be an example of such a sentence. Here the structure of the syntax is not concluded till we reach ‘task’ which is the final noun of the sentence. 

2. In the non-periodic or loose sentence, which is conversational and thus more relaxed in their effect, the component members are continuous, but so loosely joined that the sentence would have been complete in a syntactical way of inserting periods at one or more places before the actual close of the sentence. Joseph Addison’s Spectator 105 has two sentences describing the limited topics of conversation in a man-about-town, each of which could have closed at several points on a sequence of their component clauses. 

Then we have this other distinction, often made in the discussion of prose style, between hypotaxis and parataxis:

1. A hypotactic style is one in which the logical, temporal, syntactic and clausal relations between sentences and members are specified by certain words like because, when, therefore, then and the like, or even by phrases like as a result of, in order to, etc., or even by the use of subordinate phrases or clauses 

2. A paratactic style is one in which the members in a sentence or for that matter the sequence of complete sentences are put one after the other, without any expression of their connections or relations except that which uses ‘and’.

There are a large number of loosely descriptive terms that have been used in order to characterize style, such as pure, florid, gay, ornate, simple, sober, etc. In fact, as suggested by various research paper writings, we also classify style according to literary period or traditions.

For example, the works written in the Restoration era had that Restoration style of writing while the works that followed the steps of metaphysical poets had the metaphysical style of writing. Classifications are also made based on the text the work has been influenced from, according to the institutional use for example a journalese or a scientific style, or even according to the distinct practices of the individual author, for example, the Miltonic or the Shakespearean style.

In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the historians of English prose style have distinguished between the vogue of the Ciceronian style, which was named after the practice of the Roman writer Cicero, and which is elaborately constructed, is highly periodic and typically builds into a climax; and the opposite vogue of the concise, clipped, pointed and uniformly stresses sentences in the Senecan style, which was named after the Roman Seneca.

On their Clear and Simple as the Truth, Mark Turner and Francis -Noel, claimed that the standard treatments of style like the ones been described deal only with the surface features of writing. Instead, they propose a basic analysis of style in terms of a set of assumptions or fundamental decisions by an author, concerning a series of relationships. 

The style had always had its importance in the literary world as well as it is a topic to be widely explored. It impacts all the works in literature and also acquaints the readers with the different writers as well as their literary style so that next time when one reads a work of that writer, one is able to make it out. The points stated above on the topic, are thus, sufficient enough to offer assignment help to students.