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 Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Style Variation in USA

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Session Overview
Style Variation in USA
Language Variation: Dialect
Language Variation: Register
Style Variation in a poem
Reregistration
Style: What is it?
Authorial and text style
Style Variation Checksheet
Topic 6 'tool' summary
 
Useful Links
Readings

Style Variation in USA

Before we look in detail at styles and how to describe them, it will be helpful to see how much intuitive knowledge about different styles and text-types we carry around with us. Below we have constructed an exercise using two consecutive pages from a novel trilogy by the American novelist John Dos Passos More about John Dos Passos, 0000-0000. The trilogy is called USA.

The novel itself contains many different kinds of writing juxtaposed with one another. In the extract we are going to work on, there are FIVE different kinds of writing. You might find it helpful to know that four of the five styles are whole texts that, although jumbled here, still have their original ordering. The remaining style (which is the easiest to spot and which we have called 'Style A') is a series of examples of the same style type.

The Extract

(1)

PARIS SHOCKED AT LAST

(2)

We were sailing along On moonlight bay

(3)

when the metal poured out of the furnace I saw the men running to a place of safety.

(4)

industrial foes work for peace at Mrs Potter Palmer's

(5)

skating on the pond next the silver company's mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whaleoil soap

(6)

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass.

(7)

HARRIMAN SHOWN AS RAIL COLOSSUS

(8)

You can hear the voices ringing

(9)

To the right of the furnace I saw a party of ten men all of them running wildly and their clothes a mass of flames.

(10)

somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale

(11)

he walked round the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow

(12)

NOTED SWINDLER RUN TO EARTH

(13)

MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER

(14)

there was a shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters

(15)

stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring was
and found the grass green and the weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,

(16)

TEDDY WIELDS BIG STICK

(17)

They seem to say You have stolen my heart, now don't go away

(18)

Apparently some of them had been injured when the explosion occurred and several of them tripped and fell.

(19)

I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down

(20)

Just as we sang love's old sweet songs on moonlight bay

(21)

He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,

(22)

The hot metal ran over the poor men in a moment.

(23)

PRAISE MONOPOLY AS BOON TO ALL

(24)

look out for muckers everybody said Bohunk and Polak kids put stones in their snowballs write dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work
in the mills

(25)

so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,

(26)

love's old sweet song

(27)

we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice

(28)

We were sailing along on moonlight bay

(29)

found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr Darwin's Natural
Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank Potato.

(30)

Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down.

(31)

STRAPHANGERS DEMAND RELIEF

The Task

We have divided the five styles contained within the above extract into 31 short, numbered pieces, and jumbled them together. Your job is to:

(i) Sort the extracts out again into their individual style types (which we have labelled A-E below), and type them into the fields provided.

(ii) Say in as much detail as you can what kind of writing each type is.

(iii) Isolate what linguistic features are enabling you to sort out the style types and identify them.

To help you, we have told you what the first example of each style is. When you're happy with your choices, check whether they are correct by pressing the "submit" buttons. You will be able to compare your answers with Mick and Dawn's by watching the video-clip where they talk about the task. There is a full transcript available for the video's

STYLE A:

(1) and

STYLE B:

(2) and

STYLE C:

(3) and

STYLE D:

(5) and

STYLE E:

(6) and

SUMMARY

  

 

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