VI

Style, Stages, and Steps Toward Progress

I. STYLE

     1.1 At present, the field of stylistics appears somewhat stagnant and disunified. So many definitions of style have been offered—Guiraud and Kuentz (1 970: 4-1 5) listed 34 of them—that it is questionable whether different scholars are even discussing the same thing. For example, style has been variously explicated as: (a) extra ornamentation imposed on a message (cf. Enkvist, 1964; Lorian, 1970); (b) grammatical choices (Ohmann, 1964b; Hayes, 1969; but cf. Milic, 1971); (c) deviation from a norm (Enkvist, 1964; Levin, 1965; Marcus, 1968), specifically, from an abstract “grammar” in the sense of II.3.5 (Bierwisch, 1965; Thorne, 1965; Revzin, 1970; Abraham, 1972), or from a pattern established in the text itself (Riffaterre, 1959, 1960); (d) the reader’s experience of meaning (Alonso, 1942; Fish, 1970; Mounin, 1971); (e) the habits and traits of the individual text producer (Marouzeau, 1959; Chatman, 1966; Winterowd, 1970b); (f) the function of the text in communication (Havránek, 1964; Benes, 1975); and so on. Some explications were supported less by empirical discovery than by assertiveness (cf. I. I.2), ranging from the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon’s 1753 aphorism, “style is the man,” over to Gray’s (1969) denial that style even exists. Moreover, the main object of inquiry was not the text, but the literary text (VI. I.7f)—a special case acting as the general case (cf. I. I. 3).

   1.2 For a time, modern linguistics was considered a sound candidate for reorganizing the study of style (cf. Spitzer, 1948; Sebeok [Ed.], 1960; Ihwe [Ed.], 1971; Ihwe, 1972; Enkvist, 1973; Sinclair, 1975). However, this enthusiasm has gradually abated as linguistics itself reached a point of diminishing returns and linguistic theories of style remained controversial and vulnerable (Spillner, 1976). If style is extra ornamentation, then many texts could have no style at all. If style is deviation, research must wait until {280} the norm or grammar is defined (cf. criticism in Riffaterre, 1959; Delbouille, 1960; Sayce, 1962) — a project that seems rather remote now (cf. II.3.14; V.2.17). In retrospect, it was probably naive to have hoped that a purely linguistic analysis of language artifacts can account for the rich communicative contexts that define style. Linguists who study style are supplying the context themselves, including the prior supposition that a given usage or passage is stylistically relevant. The activities of the analyst as audience (selection, focus, evaluation, motivation, etc.) would be the most interesting thing to investigate (cf. II.1.7, 11; VI.I.7; Wienold, 1972; Schmidt, 1982).

    1.3 The existence of style is often argued on the grounds that you can convey the same content in different, but synonymous, expressions—in my terms, that asymmetry obtains between conceptual development vs. expression and phrase linearization (cf. III.2.27). For example, Hockett (1958: 556) maintained that “two utterances in the same language which convey approximately the same information, but which are different in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ in style.” In transformational grammar, style would result from applying different syntactic rules (Ohmann, 1964b). However, not all differences in “linguistic” or “grammatical” structure qualify as stylistically relevant (cf. I.2.8.5; V.3.19). For example, the manipulations performed during sentence-combining do not always improve the writer’s style (cf. Hunt, 1965; Christensen, 1968; Mellon, 1969; II.3.25). At least some language options can be interchanged without materially altering the style of a stretch of text. For example, we could rework a passage by John Steinbeck (1978: 96) like this:

 (464) Americans are remarkably kind and hospitable with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle around a man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence.

(464a) Americans treat both guests and strangers with remarkable kindness and hospitality; and yet they walk in a large circle around a person who is dying on the pavement. Large sums are spent retrieving cats from trees and dogs from sewer pipes; but if a girl screams for help in the street, doors slam, windows close, and the rest is silence.  

Most of these alterations in the surface text barely affect the style at all. A really conspicuous change, such as going from ‘draws only silence’ to ‘the rest is silence’, affects the style less via its linguistic structure than via its cultural context. Hamlet’s famous dying words (Hamlet, V, 11, 369) to a vast, intensely involved public in countless theatres contrast starkly with the anonymous ‘screams’ of a ‘girl’ to a small, uncaring public in an urban neighborhood. {281}

     1.4 We can conclude that style, like the rest of language, should be studied in terms of human processes within society and culture. Style is above all something intended by a text producer or experienced by a text receiver. Conspicuous elements, the so-called “style markers,” draw so much attention that it is easy to identify style with ornamentation or deviation (VI.1.1f, 7). But style actually results from the total selection, including all the background that makes the conspicuous elements meaningful. This background cannot be reconstructed with only the aid of statistical counts of items in the surface text itself, such as frequencies and proportions of nouns, verbs, modifiers, and so on (cf. Miles, 1967; Dolezel & Bailey [Eds.], 1969). These measures are inconclusive unless they bear on human processes. A stylistic background often includes elements not selected in the text at all, but expected at certain points. These elements easily go unobserved during linguistic and statistical analysis of the text as artifact.

  1.5 Style could be formulated in an empirical inquiry: how do text producers control style, and how do text receivers react to it? Milic (1971) proposed a distinction between selecting basic language options vs. making the conscious (“rhetorical”) choices that mark the style; yet this distinction is more likely a gradation of interactive processing factors such as feedback, attention, goodness of fit, threshold of termination, complexity, familiarity, informativity, and motivation (cf. III.3.3). Evidence for these factors must come from a range of diverse sources. We can compare a text with a later revision of it, assuming that changes were deliberate (Cervenka, 1971). We can try to list the various alternatives the text producer might have used (Dupriez, 1971). We can ask readers to single out text elements they consider important for the style (Frey, 1970). We can delete elements and have readers guess them (Groeben, 1975)—the so-called “cloze procedure”. Aside from the last-named one, these methods have been applied predominantly by European scholars to literary texts. American literary studies has been less favorable toward empirical research, mainly because the humanities and the sciences have been split by an unfortunate misunderstanding of each other’s methods. The complex, creative contexts of the humanities have been wrongly judged chaotic and subjective, while the experimentally controlled contexts of the sciences have been given an unduly narrow, sterile interpretation (cf. I. I.2ff; I.2.23.7).

    1.6 Operationally, style is presumably processed by SPECIALISTS: operational components assigned to regulate a particular aspect of production or reception (1.4.8; III. 1.11, 14, 27; III.2.11). These specialized processes are usually on call, but become active when triggered by relevant events and settings (e.g., if a writer wants a “formal” style for an official memo). During text production, style specialists would send appropriate parameters to memory search processes to influence the choice of options (cf. III.3.10ff). These parameters would not become active for stylistically neutral items (cf. I.2.8.5; III.3.13; V3.19), but only for candidate expressions carrying style markers in memory. The same filtering procedure would {282} run during text reception. Obviously, the skill and training of communicative participants determines how active, dominant, and well-defined these specialist processes are. The latter may not enter conscious awareness or emerge distinctly from the vastly larger complex of processes wherein they function as components. Consequently, style can hardly be uniformly defined for all texts, but at best, described in terms of its applications and effects in particular contexts. Attempts to do the former merely lead to the stagnation and disunity surveyed in V(I.1.1f.

    1.7 LITERATURE can be defined as the domain of discourse where it is allowed, though not obligatory, to envision and present alternative models of reality. POETRY can be defined as the sub-domain of literature where this alternativity is extended to possible models of discourse itself. Literature is not forced to depart from reality, nor is poetry forced to violate normal language. These domains of communication simply open conventional reality and discourse to scrutiny and discussion as one alternative among others. Of course, attention centers upon marked departures and violations because of their high informativity, so that the analyst comes to consider them the sole determinants of style (cf. VI.1.2, 4). For the same reason, stylistics naturally gravitated toward literary and poetic texts. Important writers and readers of those texts are usually distinguished by the focus they devote to language selection. In most cultures, prestigious authors have developed a style that gives them a recognizable individual voice (cf. I.2.8.6), whereas obvious imitation and ordinariness count as drawbacks. However, these values presuppose definite social and institutional expectations about how and how far an author should innovate vs. imitate. Literary criticism reflects these expectations in its value judgements.

   1.8 The devotion of stylistics to literature and poetry as sketched out above has generally eclipsed the stylistic study of non-literary texts. Traditional composition courses were largely devoted to reading, critiquing, and imitating literary styles. McLuhan (1975: 202) cites an 18th-century entry in the Oxford English Dictionary defining the “textbook” as a “Classick Author written very wide by the Students, to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines.” In some quarters, this attitude still lives on, leading to the impasse of “programs where teachers of English literature are required, under the exigencies created by open admissions policies, to teach the rudiments of writing but end up teaching literature just the same” (Shaughnessy, 1977: 222; cf. Maimon, 1981). Non-traditional students confronted with such complex refinement of literary styles as few of them could realistically hope to emulate during the course may be more intimidated than inspired.

   1.9 Literacy education has to begin from a gradual acquisition of styles for everyday purposes. As usual, the composition teacher is caught in a dilemma (cf. I.2.18: V.2.3, 31). Large segments of the average course or textbook are devoted enforcing conformity with the conventions of usage, grammar, {283} punctuation, and so on. Yet style depends crucially upon the individuality that lends writers their own voice. In practice, conflicts between upholding vs. transcending a norm are all too often resolved at the expense of creativity. The imitation of sample texts is an interesting compromise (cf. Weathers & Winchester, 1969, 1978; Weathers, 1980): gaining freedom by temporarily abdicating it. The “alternativity” of literature and poetry lends itself well to such training. The goal is to learn flexibility and control by assuming various stylistic tendencies in turn and thus getting a feel for the possibilities, including entirely new ones. Ideally, the students learn the principles of style, rather than a jumble of marked expressions to sprinkle over a text like Christmas-tree tinsel. But this goal presupposes an ambience in which students are not constantly anxious about choosing the “wrong” options (1.2.11, 17). Unless the demand for conformity is consistently balanced against the encouragement of creativity, style is likely to be treated as just another game with strict but mysterious rules (cf. VI. I. 16).

   1. 10 Students particularly need to appreciate how the stylistic tendencies of casual speech differ from those of expository writing (cf. V3.2). Though neither speech nor writing has one uniform style, the proportions of language options are typically different for the two modalities. Despite certain discrepancies, research generally indicates that writing is distinguished from speech by having longer words, more diverse vocabulary, fewer recurrent words, fewer references to the text producer and receiver(s), longer independent clauses, and more dependent clauses (cf. Borchers, 1936; Green, 1958; Horowitz & Newman, 1964; DeVito, 1965, 1966; Gibson, Gruner, Kibler, & Kelley, 1966; O’Donnell, 1974; Einhorn, 1978; Danielewicz & Chafe, 1981; Chafe, 1982). Some of the discrepancies in the findings came from difficulties deciding what would constitute a “spoken sentence,” or the spoken equivalent of a sentence (cf. II.3.13; IV.2.17; V.2,18; V.3.7ff). Others were due to differences in the choice of samples. For instance, Blankenship (1962: 422) found few clear differences and concluded “that syntactical structure is determined by an individual’s style,” and “that dimensions other than ‘written/oral... would be more useful to study.” But her samples, taped speeches vs. published essays by nationally known figures like Margaret Mead and Adlai Stevenson, are hardly representative of everyday communication: public speakers are prone to align their spoken style with their written one (V3.27), especially since they often compose written versions to be presented orally.

    1.11 Even unanimous statistics about the linguistic proportions of writing vs. speech would hardly stipulate concrete methods for teaching style. Tabulations are not procedures for developing a writing style, just as structural analysis of language samples by professional linguists is not an account of human language acquisition. Linguistic proportions are symptoms, not explanations (II.3.23); and may not be consciously monitored as proportions. Writing typically has longer, more diversified words and fewer recurrences {284} because the preserved surface text allows and encourages better control of familiarity and informativity (recurrence innovation, paraphrase, parallelism, ellipsis, etc.) (cf. IV.2.37-44; V. 3.32-37). The tendency toward more lengthy and subordinated clause formats corresponds to the more hierarchical organization of writing, as compared to the more additive organization of speech (cf. I.3.18; II.3.41, 43; IV.2.46; IV.3.15, 24; V.3.10, 13; VI.2.22). References to the text producer and receivers are less probable in a situation where the two sides don’t meet each other face to face. Hence, these linguistic proportions reflect communicative conditions that are by no means uniform in all contexts. To flatly recommend that a learner follow these proportions—or to reward them where they spontaneously appear (cf. II.3.32f)—is to reverse the natural causalities of communication. For example, sentence-combining increases the length of independent clauses, and the number of dependent clauses; but so far, no one has a documented empirical and theoretical account of how such manipulations fit into the total picture of a person’s style (cf. II.3.36-44).

   1.12 To appreciate the statistics summarized in VI.1.10,we should bear in mind that schooling massively intervenes in the natural selection of language options. The clearest illustration is found in the “class menagerie” of “rules” turned up by my student surveys (cf. I.2.14ff). During at least one course, and sometimes over several years, a student may be forbidden to use legitimate, strategic language options: first and second person, passives, contractions, etc. The dummy constructions ‘there is’ and ‘it is’ are deemed needless words by teachers unaware of the role of place-holders in creating focus, e.g. the “cleft” construction (IV.2.63). At the start of a sentence, ‘because’ is banned as an perilous instigator of sentence fragments; ‘and’ falls victim to the overuse it inherits from speech habits (V.3.13). The conversational frequency of ‘anyway’, ‘a lot’, ‘a little’, ‘very’, and ‘really’ doom them to exile. In all these “rules,” the expressions themselves are made the scapegoats merely because they are used carelessly in some contexts (1. 2. I 5).

   1.13 This unduly negative, coercive stance of some English teachers is a drastic response to the many bizarre dilemmas wherein they find themselves (cf. I.2.18; I.3.13; III.3.30; IV.3.44; V.1.40; V.2.3, 31; VI.I.9; VI.3.2). The educational system is heavily oriented toward a fixed dichotomy between “right vs. wrong responses” without regard for social and psychological contexts (I.2.13). Thus, a language item which is misused on occasion is easily thrown on the heap of items that are always plain “wrong.” Without clear definitions or theories of style, there is often no rational, orderly recourse for determining which options should or should not be used. By default, personal attitudes can be converted to rules and enforced by social and institutional leverage (grading, career chances, etc.).

    1.14 The damage done by this understandable but unfortunate attitude is hard to calculate (cf. I.2.17). The learners’ language insecurities mount, {285} especially among disadvantaged groups whose literacy skills ought to be our greatest concern. Rising anxiety makes writing far more taxing and error-prone than it has to be. The ever-changing lists of multifarious “rules” blur into chaos. Several students reported they had been forbidden to use “conjunctions”; we finally found out that the rule had really blacklisted “contractions.” Two students remembered the rule: “never underline the title of a book”—a conflation of “never underline the title of a paper” and “always underline the title of a book.” A student who loses track of all the rules tends to write in a pessimistic prescience that some of them are being unwittingly violated at any moment.

    1.15 Similar effects can result from forcing writers to follow numerical patterns (I.2.14). Several students from the same high school turned in papers as primitive and uniform as mass-produced Model T’s. Every paper had five paragraphs: the first and last stated the thesis in two sentences apiece, though in different wording; the middle three paragraphs opened, respectively, with ‘first/first of all’, ‘next/secondly’, and ‘finally/last of all’, and had exactly five sentences, the fifth one (which had to begin with “thus/ therefore/ consequently/ of course’) paraphrasing the first. The impression was oddly forced, ungainly, and repetitive, like a bad French villanelle:  

(465) First of all, deciding on the game is a very essential start. One must think carefully and decide on what game he would like to write. But he can’t pick a game that he would be unable to write. Also, he has to realize that the computer he is using may be limited in memory compared to what his needs are for the program. Of course, one can see that deciding on which program is a vital need to begin. 

At first I wondered if these students were all paying the same cut-rate hack to ghostwrite their papers ]This was long before the Internet paper-market]. It turned out that the students believed expository writing always follows this same drastic “pyramid” format (III.2.16) they had had to use on every paper in their high-school careers—they had never learned to write any other way. Their English department had decided as a body to allow no deviations, evidently to make grading easier (cf. I.2.15; I.3.14). The uniform pattern actually impeded the development of the effective, self-reliant writing skills that fit patterns to contexts, as in:  

(465a) The first step is to decide on a game that one is willing and able to write. The programmer has to stay within his abilities and also within the size of the computer’s memory.  

(465a) says the same thing neatly in two sentences (34 words), instead of awkwardly in the obligatory five (80 words) of (465). I sent a courteous but emphatic letter to the high school principal (whom my students wanted to sue in court), pointing out the unrealistic and unproductive nature of the approach; no answer came back.

     1.16 Few of students we surveyed had ever questioned the validity of the “rules” they were made to obey. They didn’t know, for example, that {286} many rules were simply the heritage of centuries of advice from obtuse grammarians. For example, “split infinitives” are still frowned upon, yet the original reason for their proscription was that they don’t work in Latin, the language taken in the old days (e,g. by John Dryden) as a model for English grammar (cf. Postman & Weingartner, 1966: 47). The fact that this construction is often useful, even inescapable, because the interposed adverb can’t very well go anyplace else, e.g.:  

(466) Just as the committee was about to rapidly consider and approve requested funds falsified figures were discovered.  

didn’t disturb the hallowed tradition. In the students’ view, teachers are supposed to know what is right or wrong; and if not, there is no recourse comparable to re-doing a math problem or looking up a historical fact in the encyclopedia. A student with divergent opinions on usage has no authority to defend them in class. As one said, “What could I do when she was handing out the grades?” Eventually, students were drilled to accept, even believe in, whatever prescriptions and prescriptions got handed down. Odd prose like (465) readily emerges from this compulsion: writing as if playing a game of hopscotch-step on the legal squares, and jump over the others, no matter how clumsy your progress becomes.

   1.17 Rather than following “rules,” writers should make stylistic decisions that fit the purpose of the discourse, as Aristotle showed long ago. The main concern of modern composition programs is EXPOSITORY WRITING, writing that tells what something is or how it works (III.1.29). As Irmscher (1979a: If) points out, exposition is not cleanly distinct from narration, description, or argumentation, but often an amalgam of all these things. Thus, “expository style” is not a set of distinctive features exposition must have in opposition to all other types; it is the range of resources that are helpful for explaining things to an audience (cf. Cooper & Gray, 1981). Standards of correctness enter in only to the extent that their violation genuinely impedes that task. Otherwise, student writers must have the right to develop their own style, and the freedom to form the text according to its uses.

    1.18 Scientific and technical discourse are among the major professional uses of exposition (Faigley et al., 1981). Competence in a field normally includes the ability to write reports about it. Even here, however, writing styles are open to language intervention. Journals and publishing houses typically employ copy editors whose authority to control usage is out of all proportion to their knowledge of either the language or of technical topics involved. For example, the contributors to a recent volume on writing research were surprised by rash of arbitrary tinkering with our manuscripts. ‘While’ was changed to ‘although’, ‘upon’ to ‘on’, ‘like’ to ‘such as’, and (of course) ‘which’ to ‘that’. The useful abbreviations ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ got axed in favor of the longer ‘for example’ and ‘that is’ {287} — despite monotony and wasted space. Commas bloomed into semicolons, and vice-versa. Dashes, hyphens, and quotation marks vanished like sand in a desert wind: their presumed inelegance was grounds to make authors suppress the distinction between their own terms and terms quoted from special sources; and adopt oddities like ‘loosely-knit’. My angry letters brought to light that our copy editor was trying (sporadically) to uphold the “good” usage prescribed in the handbook Modern American Usage by the arrant Wilson Follett, of all people. In effect, the prose of noted researchers on writing, such as James Britton, Carl Bereiter, and Arthur Applebee, was being tailored to the whimsical biases of an self-aggrandizing pedant (cf. I.2.11). Small wonder that the letter replying to my objections stiffly hoped I wasn’t “insisting that there were no standards to be adhered to” (i.e., that I wasn’t another “saboteur” in Follett-ese).

   1.19 Quaint notions about science as an institution filter down into stylistic biases about expository writing. Scientific objectivity is widely thought to require that the participants in communication, plus their goals and belief systems, should remain invisible, like the tricks and gadgets that make us think we’re seeing miracles in a Hollywood Bible epic. The teachers who sternly forbid opinions in student essays (cf. I.2.14) are sacrificing their incense (and sense) on the same altar. The shibboleth denouncing the first and second person, another proverb from the same gospel, is still revered in “style sheets” (including, I am pained to say, the one issued by my own department). In scientific and technical discourse, the text topic and the issues it entails naturally dominate over the roles of text producer and audience, who are after all not usually face to face (VI.1.11; VI.2.9). But a clumsy avoidance of personal references is not in the interests of genuine science. The more an author agonizes over locutions and circumlocutions that obscure his or her own role and motivation in the discussion, the more we might suspect the statements being made—just as a jury disbelieves an evasive witness. Yet “many writers of scholarly prose, and almost all teachers, believe—mistakenly—that editors will not accept” the first person; “scientific writing in particular, they believe, demands an aloof, third person style to demonstrate the author’s objectivity—or at least his or her modesty” (Williams, 1981b: 27f). Baldwin’s (1981: 223) survey found the second person “in all but the most scholarly journals,” including “addressing the reader” and “uses of ‘you’ as an indefinite pronoun.1[Strangely enough, Baldwin (1981: 224) clings to the old misconception that “technical and scientific writing never uses the first or second person, employing as it does the third person and passive voice to emphasize the objectivity of the research.” Let’s hope this “objectivity” doesn’t rest on grammar alone.]

   1.20 The rule presumably lives on because it also presents the scientist’s own intuitions, inclinations, and commitments as an abstract institution. You can garner authority by casting yourself as ‘this researcher’ (or ‘the present writer’): {288}  

(467) This researcher simply felt that grammar is an indispensable tool for the researcher (O’Hare, 1973: 2)

 If you can’t figure out what your findings mean, you can say:  

(468) An interpretation of this interaction does not readily present itself. (Blass & Siegman, 1975: 31)

 I can’t see the benefits of these coy, ungraceful flourishes, least of all in studies of the writing process itself. I know I am ‘1’ (for better or for worse); an audience should decide for itself whether I am also a ‘researcher’. If ‘I’ am the one making a presentation, surely (469a) rather than the awkward (469) is no act of hybris:  

(469) This whole question will of course be returned to. (O’Hare, 1973: 37) 

(469a) I will of course return to this whole question.

   1.21 If an audience is expected to read a paper, they deserve to find out what this particular writer has to offer. The latter’s stance and thesis affect the entire dynamics of communication and thus the motivation for reading the text at all. A writer’s views should be openly identified as such whenever their departure from the prevailing consensus might not be clear. Stylistic taboos against the first-person may lead to genuine confusion. One paper of mine was scolded by a journal referee whose own style exhibited no shimmering polish:  

(470) The informality of the paper has been localized in the use of the first person.

The anonymous pedagogue serenely deleted all first-persons, even if the statement was thereby falsified:

(471) According to the most recent version I could obtain, the reading process would run as follows. [my text]

(471a) According to the most recent obtainable version the reading process would run as follows. [revision]

I didn’t even know what the “most recent obtainable version” was; I only could cite what I personally had coaxed, over the telephone, out of a harried scientist at BBN battling madly against grant deadlines. For all I knew, he grabbed the report from the top of some stack and mailed it off.

   1.22 The abuse of the passive to conceal the individual and his or her views inside a protective institution has long been censured by writing experts (e.g. Gibson 1966: 94; Shaughnessy, 1977: 86; Williams, 1981b: 25ff). However, such abuses mislead some people to see the tool itself as the villain and throw out the passive along with its many positive uses (Walpole, 1979; cf. I.2.14; VI.I.2). The experimental research reviewed in IV.2.61 shows that the passive is the natural and justified choice for ranking the object of an action over the agent in numerous contexts. In scientific and technical writing, for example, the agent is often a lab technician, an experimenter, or a natural force, none of which need be relevant to a statement. Compare:

(472) Excised curarized frog sartorius muscles were massively stimulated. (Gopnik, 1972: 126)

(472a) Two overworked and nauseated graduate students in biology massively stimulated excised curarized frog sartorius muscles.  

Curiously, passives are often condemned in the same “style sheets” as the first person. A student who strains to avoid the latter, e.g.: 

(473) It was wondered if this doll was the last. 

falls from grace for using the former. In practice, style-conscious expository writers avoid the first person much more consistently than the passive. Language authorities may employ the passive at the very moment they berate it (Williams, 198la: 158):  

(474) I list [... ] the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged [ ... ] the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active. (Orwell)

(475) Emphasis is often achieved by the use of verbs in the active rather than in the passive voice. (Reisman)  

Evidently, the conflict between two mutually exclusive “rules” is resolved in favor of the one that lends more institutional authority to the writer’s role (cf. VI. I. 20).

    1.23 Scientific and technical style are also characterized by specialized vocabulary whose acceptance is a necessary ritual for membership in a scientific or technical community (cf. Kuhn, 1970). The original impetus was to promote communication by agreeing on a set of defined, standardized terms. But communication only suffers when the terms are used as barriers against the general audience, and displayed like medals in a military parade to cow the ordinary citizen. Many terms continue to appear in published prose long after the theories that engendered them have grown unfashionable — “stimulus/response’ (II.2.5), ‘competence’ (II.3.9), ‘left-branching’ (II.1.13), ‘T-unit’ (II.3.18), etc. Unless the terms are re-defined via current theories, large research projects may be misleadingly conceptualized and described. On the other hand, changing entrenched terminology is a hard and thankless labor. Some of my terms in this book, though carefully explained and indexed, are ungainly and novel enough to be attacked as “jargon.” ‘Text producer’ covers both ‘speaker’ and ‘writer’; ‘processing’ includes both mental and physical agency; ‘informativity’ and ‘intertextuality’ designate standards that make a text a text. Elegance and euphony must be sacrificed to precision now and then, but finicky demurrals can be expected.

   1.24 Professional organizations may set express guidelines for style. For example, the “publication manual” of the American Psychological Association has been embraced by many journals and has contributed greatly to standardization. But some of its specifications are arbitrary {290} and inconsiderate.1 [See the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Assocation, second edition (Baltimore: Garamond/Pridemark, 1974), pp. 59ff. Saving space can’t be the motive, since the same sheet demands ‘pp.’ for page numbers, e.g. (1970, pp. 3If) where (1970: 3ff) would be perfectly clear. More likely, the convenience of the author (not having to look up names and numbers) is being rated over that of the reader (cf. III.3.16).]  In a bibliography, researchers have only initials, not first names, and page numbers are given for journals, but not for edited volumes. Interdisciplinary readers may spend hours in the library trying to find the mailing address of ‘J.R. Anderson’ or ‘E.E. Smith’; or sorting out ‘G. Miller’ into ‘George’ vs. ‘Gerald’, and ‘N. Johnson’ into ‘Nancy’ vs. ‘Neal’; or leafing through thick tomes to track down a citation. References in the text go in alphabetical order, though chronological order is more sensible in fields where research is historical and cumulative. I myself follow such directives only when they do not inconvenience readers. Uniformity is no excuse for hampering communication.

    1.25 As this illustration suggests, standardization ought to be done on rational grounds. Style is not likely to improve in the whole society until we all agree to resolve the trade-off between the writer’s convenience and mannerisms vs. the audience’s needs for clarity and readability (cf. I.2.1 1; III.3.16; IV.2.67; IV3.35; VI.2.37). Traditional priorities have largely been the opposite, and for at least two cogent reasons. First, verbose, complicated, and disorganized prose is much easier to churn out than concise, streamlined, and transparent prose. When I thought, after at least twenty revisions of most passages, that I had this book done, I read it again (silently and out loud) and saw it was still too long and awkwardly composed. To take my own advice, I had to face the orgy of fear and loathing involved in starting over. Even spending between 7 and 16 hours a day at a word processor (far better than a typewriter for this sort of thing), I needed over two months to manicure the monster into what I began to consider readable English. (Chapter 1, for instance, shrank by almost 20%—and it had already been edited the most, since revising complete chapters is less horrible than drafting new ones.) Nearly every word and sentence was eyed with keen distrust; paragraphs and sections migrated from chapter to chapter to unify the stages of the discussion (not too nice when you are working with those 5-inch floppies that held about five pages each). To insist on clarity and organization in exposition sometimes demands a twinge of fanaticism.

   1.26 The second reason is that verbose, complex prose can bring rich rewards. Businesses and agencies win out over customers by giving them unreadable contracts to sign, as I have learned from testifying in court on the meaning of cryptic insurance policies,1 [Things improved when Florida passed a regulation that the customer wins the case as soon as the court is convinced that the disputed passage is indeed ambiguous or incomprehensible. However, not all customers know about this advantage.] e.g.: 

(476) “Residence employee” means an employee of an insured person while performing duties arising out of and in the course of employment in connection with  the maintenance or use of the residence premises, including similar duties elsewhere, not in connection with the business of an insured person.  

Public laws and statutes are often too arcanely expressed for the general public to discuss or contest, sometimes even baffling professional lawyers (cf. Bond, Hayes, & Flower, 1981; Charrow, 1981). Beyond these tangible effects, cumbersome prose apparently flatters the ego of its perpetrator. Forcing readers to slave for comprehension, and to reply in the same arduous language, is an exercise of power and privilege, as bureaucrats well knows (cf. II.3.26; III.3.16; V3.37; VI.I.23). The allurements of writing obscurely are almost irresistible. On one side, tradition, philosophy, government, law, commerce, science, and technology seem to clamor for ornate, complex, and abstruse discourse; on the other side, the obliging, unseen reader modestly asks for clear, concrete, and readable discourse.

    1.27 A reorientation of style toward the reader can begin nowhere else but in the teaching of English composition. Instructors should both align their responses to style with socially general responses and work to disseminate stylistic tolerance and enlightenment in society itself (Gere & Smith, 1979). Purpose and audience should be better defined (III.2.12f, 19), so that stylistic choices could be made in terms of their relevance (VI.1.17). If we concur that writing in school should prepare students for writing in real life, stylistic compulsions such as blacklisted words or phrases and straitjacket essay formats (VI.1.12-15) are irrelevant. Writing with the sole purpose of following “rules” to get a good grade doesn’t equal writing to convey a message. A clear, direct style is hard enough without fretting over whether it is “incorrect” to open a sentence with a conjunction or a relative clause with ‘which’ instead of ‘that’. Too much stress on minor points blocks the major ones from view (cf. I.2.17).

    1.28 Paradoxically, students worry about style to the point of adopting tactics that only make the matter worse. Rule violations, they hope, will get lost in a tangle of complex prose. This strained, pretentious complexity is naturally disaster-prone, as we see in a memo mailed out by rural Florida high-school graduates to explain how they selected a site for a class reunion. No doubt pseudo-officialese was thought to be the tone a proper organizing committee should adopt, but the result was:  

(477) Our conclusions were based on many features, of which includes mutual agreement as of the time and nature of the reunion. Although we strongly considered pursuing indivudal [sic] imput [sic] from all former class members on this matter, we all felt that it would be best to tentatively commit ourselves to the plans outline below [... j Please include with remittance pictures of you children, names & ages on back please they will be returned at reunion.  

Student writers with greater skill may still fall victim to their own mazes, e.g., overlooking the reactivation in (cf. V.3.33): 

 (478) The actionist is the one with whom the practitioner deals with to accomplish tasks and to achieve goals of change effort.{292}  

Somewhere in their schooling, such students must have had teachers who graded highly for pompous style, even if it wasn’t officially recommended (cf. II.3.26f). Otherwise, why would freshman writers proudly hand in prose replete with nominalizations and recurrences, e.g.: 

(479) a new engineer may be assigned to a design department where he assists in the performance of calculations needed to the development of a new vehicle design; or to a structural analysis group where he cheeks strengths of the vehicle’s structures; to a performance group in which calculations on speed and other performance items are made [etc.]  

The student who defined ‘good writing’ as ‘writing you can’t understand,’ or the student who complained that she deserved a higher grade on her essay because she had read it to her friends and they hadn’t understood it, or the class that ranked a piece of gobbledygook above a passage by Mark Twain-such students have merely accepted the models that society offers them” (Shaughnessy, 1977: 196f).

    1.29 To bring about changes in people’s writing style, we can start from the same approach I proposed for moving from speech to writing in V. 3. We can diagnose and build upon the current skills and attitudes people exhibit toward style, for instance, when asked to vary the style of a stretch of text. We can test how stylistic variations affect the people’s abilities to understand and remember text content (cf. Jones, 1977; Thorndyke, 1977; Beaugrande, 1979c, 1980a, 1982e). This second line of inquiry accidentally shed some light on the first. Working with Walter Kintsch, I designed variants of a prose sample he (and several researchers before him, such as Ernie Rothkopf at Bell Laboratories) had already used in experiments. It wasn’t very well-written to begin with (an old “reading test lesson” from McCall and Crabbs) as I have since been told more often than was at all called-for, but I had to use what was available. The original went like this:¹ [The other versions are listed in Beaugrande (1979c: 51f); which report also deals with how readers tended to imitate in their protocols the style of the version they read; and with how the six versions were graded by composition experts.]  

(480) A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a desert in New Mexico. Empty, it weighed five tons. For fuel it carried eight tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen. Everything was ready. Scientists and generals withdrew to some distance and crouched behind earth mounds. Tvo red flares rose as a signal to fire the rocket.

     With a great roar and a burst of flame the rocket rose slowly and then faster and faster. Behind it trailed sixty feet of yellow flame. Soon the flame came to look like a yellow star. In a few seconds it was too high to be seen, but radar tracked it as it sped upward to 3,000 rnph. A few minutes after it was fired, the pilot of a watching plane saw it return at a speed of 2,400 mph and plunge into earth forty miles from the starting point.

 {293} Our tests with Colorado psychology students had a striking result: whether the style was plain, terse, ornate, blundering, or downright misleading, readers understood and recalled the content almost uniformly well. Yet surely style matters in everyday life, unless students have become experts at dealing with disorganized prose. To my relief, later tests showed that the uniformity was due to the well-structured, familiar topic that helped readers predict and integrate content (cf. IV2.48). The same style variations had significant effects when the topic was more remote, e.g., ‘the cause of sunspots’.

   1.30 Meanwhile, I was re-running the original tests with composition students, partly as another memory probe and partly as a diagnostic of their writing experience (cf. VI.3.8ff). I would read it aloud and have them “tell it in their own words.” The switch from psychology classes to English composition classes had a curious side-effect. Several students thought the point of the task was not to recall the content so much as to parade their style. Instead of a dumb test lesson for kids, prose came back that xould qualify its instigators as future writer for Hollywood:  

(481) Thier they stood, three striving scientists looking at thier creation, thier live ambition. The Autumn night was cool, with a gentle breeze, and moonlight streaming down reflecting off thier metallic god looming above them.

(482) Night turns to day, light to dark [huh?]; lightening sparks, the heavens open up dragging the rocking and panicing craft to an unwilling destiny Forces. encircle and pull and draw to the brimstone hell in heaven Through icicle stars and around Jacob’s-coat colored bodies of matter, past hazy smoke forming rivers ending in misty whirlpools.  

The psychology students had used a mere handful of mildly extravagant words, and only on the one version I had transformed into a correspondingly overdone style. Apparently, entering a composition class creates a special context that can impose a peculiar interpretation upon a neutral task (cf. III.3.24-30).

     1.31 To pursue the matter, I gave another class copies of (480) and asked them to “put it into a fancy-sounding style.” What that might mean they had to imagine on their own. The topic of space flight should allow some leeway to enact whatever the students believed to affect style. As it turned out, most of them manipulated the style with a limited set of consistent techniques:
   1.31.1 Synonyms were substituted for text expressions. The ‘rocket’ was a ‘missile’, ‘craft’, ‘spacecraft’, ‘projectile’, ‘ship’, ‘space vehical’, ‘vessel’, or ‘tower’. ‘Stood’ was traded for ‘towered’, ‘abode’, or ‘stalked’, ‘empty’ for ‘vacant’, ‘carried’ for ‘transported’, and ‘fuel’ for ‘propellant’. Instead of ‘withdrawing’ and ‘crouching’, the personnel ‘dispersed and shielded themselves’, or ‘receded and squashed down’. The ‘radar’ ‘detected’ or ‘traced’ the rocket rather than ‘tracking’ it. The synonyms were presumably intended to be rarer and fancier than the original vocabulary; some of the uses were certainly unconventional in these contexts. {294}

   1.31.2 Modifiers were inserted so generously that they must have been considered decisive markers of style. Some papers opened with a flourish:  

(483) An uncomprehendable, pitch-black and sun-blazing yellow, high-speed, V-2, rocket jet

(484) An enormous jet stream glossy black and canary yellow V-2 rocket 

The ‘desert’ was termed ‘dry’, ‘arid’, ‘barren’, ‘lifeless’, ‘lonely’, ‘red-hot’, ‘scorching’, ‘blistering’, and ‘sun-bleached’. The ‘alcohol’ was ‘potent’, and the ‘liquid oxygen’ ‘precious’. The ‘scientists’ and ‘generals’, who were extolled as ‘brilliant’, ‘important’, ‘well-trained’, and ‘respected’, hid behind mounds that wavered among being ‘chocolate’, ‘clay colored’, ‘sandinfested’, or ‘muddy, sloshy’.¹[Cape Kennedy may have been the launching scene that triggered such mental imagery. When slides of that location were shown during the reading, readers tended to disregard the ‘desert’ in their reports.)] The ‘star’ was (inevitably) ‘twinkling’. The epidemic of modifiers even seized expressions of quantity: ‘a complete forty-six feet’; ‘time-lacking seconds’; ‘a seemingly endless few minutes’; and ‘a whopping 3000 miles per single solitary hour’.

     1.31.3 Sensory impressions were conveyed, mostly visual, some acoustic. Colors were intensified: ‘coal black’, ‘brightly painted yellow’, ‘lemon yellow’, ‘blood red’, ‘ruby red’, and ‘scarlet’. Costumes were donated: ‘scientists dressed in white lab coats and generals clad in military attire’ ‘with tons of medals hanging from their uniforms’. The ‘roar and burst’ touched off apocalyptic eloquence: ‘radiant’, ‘sweltering’, ‘fearful’, ‘growling’, ‘tumultuous’, ‘thunderous’, ‘deafening’, ‘earth-shaking’, and ‘earth-shattering’. The take-off left behind a ‘collection of torrid flames’ and a ‘fluttering waning star’ as the rocket ‘dashed upward’ and then ‘spiraled to the earth’, where it ‘smashed into the hard terrain’ and was left a ‘smoldering hulk’. In the burgeoning euphoria, the modest ‘flares’ of the original (480a) were promoted to miniature rockets:  

(480a) Two red flares rose

(485) A pair of crimson flares jetted into the sky

(486) Two lazerlike flares raged across the sky

(487) Two fiery, engine-red flares were forcefully shot up into the heavens.  

Evidently, the students associated high style with vivid, colorful scenes and events.

    1.31.4 Quantities were emphasized or increased. The ‘V-2 rocket’, actually quite humble compared to a Titan or an Atlas, was ‘hulking’, ‘humongous’, ‘colosal’, and ‘gargantuan’; the ‘tons’ it weighed were ‘massive’, ‘ponderous’, and ‘whopping’. The personnel, along with ‘millions of onlookers’, withdrew to an ‘extreme distance’ behind ‘massive mountains of earth’. The rocket flew at ‘blazing’, ‘fantastic’, or ‘unfathomable speeds’ {295} and returned ‘minutes, seemingly hours later’ to its ‘wopping impact’ at a ‘considerable lengthy distance’ from the starting point. Hyperbole of diniension thus assumed the stylistic role it sometimes had for such authors as Rabelais and Shakespeare: 

(488) His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm

Crested the world. His voice was propertied

As all the tuned spheres […] Realms and islands

Were as plates dropped from his pocket. (Antony and Cleopatra, V, ii, 82-92)  

   1.31.5 Human reactions to events were depicted. Sometimes, the reactions were assigned to the characters in the story. The ‘scientists and generals’ were ‘cautious’, ‘eager’, ‘sceptical’, ‘unbelieving’, ‘tense’, ‘concerned’, ‘anxious’, or ‘excited’. The ‘pilot’ was ‘worried’ or ‘incredulous’. Other times, the reactions belonged to no agent in particular. The ‘overwhelmingly great’ or ‘incredibably bulky rocket’ with its ‘overwhelmingly awesome 46 feet’ was ‘unbelievably rurnored to weigh a massive five tons, when empty!!!!’ After the ‘alarmingly red flares’ rose, it went aloft with ‘an impressive roar’ and an ‘agonizing slowness’ that gave way to an ‘incredible’, ‘amazing’, or ‘hair-raising speed’. After ‘climactic’, ‘breathtaking moments’, it went into a ‘devastating’, ‘pitiful plunge’. The writers’ intention was no doubt to suggest how the reader should react.

   1.31.6 Metaphors were introduced into a text previously devoid of them (aside from the ‘yellow star’). The rocket ‘thrived on’ fuel ‘to satisfy its huge appetite’. A ‘explosion screamed’ as the craft took off like a ‘ray of fury’ amid ‘a great bluster of engines’ and a ‘chorus of rumbling volcanoes’. It ‘crashed through the atmosphere’, ‘released by man’s claws into the uncaptive desolution of space’, and ‘worked toward its destiny’, followed by its ‘plume of yellow flame’. Though it ‘escaped from the clutches of earth’s gravity’, the rocket couldn’t elude ‘the invisible, reaching fingers of radar’, that ‘modern miracle’. Finally, a ‘pilot, sentinel to the atmosphere’, saw it ‘return like a loyal friend’ and ‘plunge like a meteor’ down to ‘mother Earth’.

    1.31.7 Technological terms served as stylistic decorations. The ‘fuel-injected rocket’, a ‘huge piece of man’s technology’, was powered by a ‘highly combustible’ and ‘highly volatile mixture’ of fuel with ‘oxygen in its unusual liquid form’. The launch came ‘with all systems go’, when ‘all mechanisms had the go-ahead’. Tracking was done with a ‘precise and complicated’ or ‘advanced radar system’, or with ‘highly technical radar equipment’. The ‘pilot’ was retrained to be an ‘engineer’. Apparently, technological terms are taken as style markers because they are characteristic of scientific and technical text types, just as metaphors are associated with literary and poetic texts.

   1.32 It was striking that a class of naive writers should spontaneously deploy such consistent techniques to influence style. {296} The techniques listed in I.31.1-7 accounted for nearly all operations performed on the original sample (480). Apparently due to the vivid, concrete topic, vague bureaucratic language was only rarely put into play, e.g., when the rocket returned to the ‘point of commencement of this activity’; or when the personnel ‘withdrew their physical position’. Also, I had been inoculating the students all along by having them simplify and revise ponderous, gratuitous verbiage (VI.1.34).

    1.33 Admittedly, the freshmen didn’t firmly control their forays into fancy style and slipped off into parody. Their intent to “substitute” the words of academia” “for the plain words of daily life” (Shaughnessy, 1977: 188) was not always felicitous: ‘magnanimous’ for ‘huge’, ‘vacuous’ for ‘empty’, ‘abode’ for ‘stood’, etc. And their neologisms or solecisms may have been mere confusions of established words: ‘illustrous red blazes’, an ‘illuminous flame’, a ‘gleamy star’, an ‘inconvincible five tons’, an ‘uncaptive desolution’, or a ‘desecration of the rocket’. Still, whatever we want to teach about style must begin from the learner’s beliefs and tactics regarding style. Like their grammar, the students’ style is a body of procedures derived from experience and deserves to be tapped and applied-not just derided and patronized because the writers do not wield the academic authority of scholars and poets. Freedom to experiment is the first step toward improving stylistic sensitivity and competence (cf. Weathers, 1980; VI.1.9).

   1.34 Though at an early stage, my findings on style and its acquisition support these contentions. If, as Marcel Proust remarked, “style is a quality of vision, a revelation of the universe particular to each of us, not seen by others,” a teacher should encourage more variety and less conformity. Students can profit most by manipulating styles without being afraid of intolerant reactions. At least in basic work, students should be encouraged to expand the uses of their current vocabularies before they risk the appropriation of exotic new words. Even unskilled writers have a larger and more complicated stock of words than their casual conversation reveals. As we saw in VI. 1.28, the teacher sometimes needs to calm them down when they want to display dangerously elaborate language. For the naive writer, a thesaurus is treacherous by listing items without contexts. Many words in such lists cannot be substituted for each other except to pursue a specific intention (sarcasm, hyperbole, etc.). Exercises should include simplifying style as well as making it fancier. It requires some exertion to retrain a writer who thinks that English papers should be as pompous as possible. The student who wrote (489) regularly has to go through a cumbersome version before she reaches a more readable one like (489a):  

(489) Various forms of emotional frustration and behavioral disturbances result from the child’s inability to meet the demands of the world with adequate equipment for communicating. Autistic children have difficulty making use of auditory information.

(489a) Disturbances result because the child cannot meet the demands of the  world without the ability to communicate. The autistic child has a pronounced hearing problem.  

In principle, there is no reason why toning down elevated style can’t be done with explicit revision techniques just as well as reworking (‘toning up’) casual, speech-based style (cf. V.3.39ff). Whatever resources the student already has should be harnessed.

   1.35 In a society where language style is so closely tied to roles, status, and attitudes, the teacher’s task cannot be easy. But for the same reason, it is extremely crucial that stylistic flexibility and control be acquired during one’s education. As Mellon (1969: 82) observes, “the teaching of styles” is “what we really mean when we speak of teaching writing.” Individual interviews help to tailor our advice on style to the aspirations of each student. Much more research needs to address the evolution of stylistic awareness in skilled writers, and the methods for influencing that evolution through instruction. Some intuitions and strategies are already present, as we can see from the results in V.1.3.1. Comprehensive, tolerant training can encourage the advancement of the student’s own skills and, in the long run, of society’s disposition toward straightforward communication and mutual respect among linguistic personalities.  

2. THE STAGES OF DISCOURSE 

    2.1 Like style, the STAGES of a discourse, i.e., its progression from beginning to end, have not been well defined in terms of processes. The preoccupation with mechanical matters eclipsed the instruction of stages until the recent re-introduction of rhetoric into composition (cf. I.3.17f; II.3.34; III.2.23; IV.2.41; VI.2.22). Skilled speakers and writers intuitively know how to organize a progression such that a discourse has a workable beginning, middle, and end. The beginning and end are typically less fuzzily defined than the middle (whatever comes in between). Explicit signals such as ‘to start with’, ‘in conclusion’, and so on, are less decisive (and more intrusive) than the flow of content and purpose (VI.2.10, 36). A complex interaction among goals, ideas, and conceptual development decides what is talked about and when. Frequently, writing states a THESIS: an outlook on a problematic issue (cf. III.2.16). The strategic position of the thesis is often, but not always, at the beginning and end. Presenting your thesis at the beginning appears to be effective if the audience is not yet strongly committed on the issue, or is unfamiliar with it; and if the opposing thesis won’t be presented, or else only after the audience has committed itself (cf. Hovland, 1974). Following up your thesis right away with supporting evidence is persuasive (cf. Weiss, Rawson, & Pasamanick, 1974). Restating your thesis at the end is helpful if the opposing thesis was presented quite a bit earlier; {298} and if the audience can  act on your thesis soon after the discourse (cf. N. Miller & Campbell, 1974; Wilson & H. Miller, 1974).¹ [Attitude change is affected by other factors besides order of presentation, e.g., by the impact of the discourse on emotions, anxieties, prior commitments, participant roles (self- esteem, social influence, ego defense), and so on. An important collection of papers is offered in Himmelfarb & Eagly (Eds.), (1974). Although cognitive states are assiduously circumscribed in iron-clad behaviorist jargon (e.g. “{attitudinal verbal reinforcements”), the work merits consideration—provided a theoretical framework can be found (cf. Steinman, 1982: 320f).

     2.2 Since the deepest phase of processing is goal-planning (111.2.6), participants need a reason for the discourse: why speaking or writing should take place at all. The reason is usually clarified during the beginning, either through monitoring the immediate situation, or through introducing a topic that is relevant, i.e., bearing on the participants' goals and intentions (cf. 11.2.10; 111.2.9, 15; VI.2.6f, 11, 32). In the next-deepest phase, that of ideas, the content of the discourse is organized and inter-connected in an, explicit topic flow. This flow is often controlled by degrees of generality (cf. Vi.2.7, 22ff, 28, 34, 36): thesis vs. evidence, whole vs. part, and so on. Each topic in succession is expected to be both interesting (novel, unexpected,] etc., VI.2.32) as well as relevant within the context of previous topics or of the situation. Since problems are typically both interesting and relevant (VI.2.8-1 1), a thesis makes a good topic. Eventually, the discourse ends when the the topic flow appears satisfactorily resolved, e.g., when headway has been made toward the participants' goals. The middle of the discourse therefore usually pursues goals and elaborates topics, and is accordingly lower in generality than the beginning and ending (VI.2. 10f, 23; 34ff). But all these tendencies can change in context. For instance, a general thesis is more common in personal essays than in scientific and technical texts (VI.2.7ff). 2.3 In spoken conversation between two people, both participants can contribute to beginning and ending the discourse, plus negotiating the topics in the middle (cf. Schegloff, 1968; Jefferson, 1973; Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). When the speakers meet face-to-face, greetings are exchanged with the options of entering into a discourse or continuing on one's way. If conversation begins, the first topic is likely to be construed and remembered as the reason for the discourse; hence, the more relevant (urgent, important, salient) a possible topic seems, the more likely a speaker is to start a discourse rather than walk away. Once the discourse gets going, the conversation itself offers further contexts in which other topics become relevant (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973: 301f). Thus, topics may concern the situation at hand, the immediately preceding utterances, and the prior knowledge shared among participants. Consider this sample (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973: 314).² [Following Schegloff and co-workers, I use 'h' and 'hh' for less vs. more intense aspira-tions; and '[&]' for the point where an utterance starts to overlap with that of the next speaker. The need for special ways to transcribe speech typically collides with the need to read the samples in a easy, natural way.} 

(490) A: Allo

B: Did I wake you

A: Who’s it

B: Nancy

A: Oh hi

B: Hi did I wake you

A: No no no, not at all hh [&] h ed ringing I kept thinkin maybe

B: [mumble] after a while it start I should hang up but I you know hh

A: No no no, it’s OK. [&] I was just uh rushing a little that’s all hh

B: Oh good. hh Urnmm don’t bring any sausage [etc.]

The opening is devoted to the reason why speaker A took so long to answer the phone. When the situation has been monitored to see if conversation is convenient, the topic of ‘bringing sausage’ supplies the reason for the discourse. B’s goal is to prevent an expected action on A’s part.

    2.4 The middle of a conversation has a topic flow that can be influenced by how speaking turns are assigned (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Reichman (1978) argues that a small range of content relationships accounts for the coherence of conversation. A topic may be either a specification or a generalization of its predecessor, or may rehearse the same content in a clarified or reconsidered perspective. One example is a conversation where A is telling about her mother (Reichman, 1978: 303f normalized the transcription for print):  

(491) A: She never liked her position in her job, which was a big part of her stupid problem, that she never changed it. Oh didn’t I tell you, when I was home a couple of—about two months ago I was really angry ‘cause I know how much she’s suffered ‘cause she hasn’t had a career—or feelings of inferiority. And here I’m doing it and she’s trying to stop me. And so, you know, I get so angry, and she was sitting and talking how important it is to have a career and to be able to do what you’re doing. And I was just sitting in the living room dying, really getting angry. But I didn’t say anything, which I thought was progress that I didn’t say anything.

B: Is it?

A: Oh it was progress, ‘cause I used to get into stupid arguments and fights with them.

B: But isn’t it hard work, to keep all that in? 

The general topic of how someone’s mother feels about her job shifts down to a specific incident between her and the speaker in regard to ‘having a career’. A confrontation with the mother and the speaker’s reported reactions lead off toward a different general topic, whether it’s better to keep silent when you’re angry or to say something about it. Each topic illustrates, or is illustrated by, the one just before it. This sequence of close content associations contrasts with far-ranging topic shifts that pick up on something in the external situation, as in (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974: 714): {300} 

(492) A: Oh I could drive if you want me to.

B: Well no I’ll drive,don’ min’

A: hhh I meant to offah [pause of 16 seconds] These shoes look nice when you keep putting stuff on ‘em

 The ‘driving’ topic was exhausted, and, after a pause, the ‘shoes’ were noticed and monitored as the new topic.

    2.5 Once the reason for the conversation is apparent, the major option is to close; one participant offers a closing which the other one accepts or rejects (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973: 307):  

(493) A: I ... ] and uh we’re gonna see if we can’t uh tie in our plans a little better

B: Okay [&] fine

A: Alright?

B: Right

A: Okay boy.

B: Okay

A: Bye [&] bye

B: G’night  

As Schegloff and Sacks (1973: 306) note, a popular conversational closing is a general statement, such as “conventional wisdom which can be heard as the ‘moral’ or ‘lesson’ of the topic thereby being possibly closed.” In (493), the general goal of ‘tying in plans better’ winds things up. In another example (ibid.), one speaker closes off the topic with a commonplace saying:  

   (494) A: Uh-you know, it’s just like bringin the blood up.

             B: Yeah well, things uh always work out for the best  

and the conversation ends almost at once. Such general statements make good endings because they won’t be argued with (even when things work out for the worst) and don’t need further illustrations. Just as a controversial thesis leads into a discourse, a trivial one leads back out.

   2.6 The coherence of expository writing is of course organized differently from that of conversation (cf. Tannen [Ed.], 1983; V.3.2). The communicative situation and shared past experience are mediated in time and space, so that commonsense knowledge may be the only reliable background. Harweg (1980) calls most written texts “non-obtrusive” (the audience comes to the text rather than vice-versa) and “pluri-local (the audience does not share the visual field of the text producer).¹ [Harweg stresses that this is not a speaking vs. writing distinction. For example, students pass written notes in class: the text comes to the audience, and visual fields are shared. Still, written texts are more often “non-obtrusive” than spoken ones.] These factors constrain the options typically used in the beginning, middle, or end of the written text. The discourse goal tends to be less explicit, sometimes unacknowledged, {301} and its relevance to the audience’s personal situation more remote. Topics can be presented for their interest value, or their relevance to wide social concerns (cf. VI.2.2, 33, 36). For example, Hunter S. Thompson’s study of the Hell’s Angels portrays motorcycle gangs as losers fighting back on a society that both abhors and is fascinated by the lawless freedom of its own outcasts. Yet audiences may prefer to read the book for its novel and salient content and to disregard its social aspect.

    2.7 The fact that the audience must seek out the written text influences the overall transaction between writer and reader (cf. Shanklin, 1982). By obtaining and concerning itself with the text, the audience has already shown its willingness to consider topics and goals whose relevance is mediated. If you start reading a biography, such as Lytton Strachey’s The End of General Gordon:  

(495) During the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen, wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighborhood of Jerusalem.  

you face a higher density of informative content than you would at the opening of a normal conversation (Harweg, 1980: 318f). The writer is expected to reward the audience’s effort of obtaining the text and accepting dense, remote content. The personal essay, an expository sub-type favored in some composition courses, lends the writer a conspicuous role: to inform or entertain the audience with personal knowledge and experience. To fit this main goal, the text often begins with a high degree of generality, e.g., what is true of society at large, so that the topic appears widely revelant and motivates further reading:1 [Samples (496-499) are from Levin (Ed.), (1977: 2, 169, 7, 57) ] 

(496) We live in an age of change and mobility. (Martin Krovetz)

(497) Everybody at some time has probably felt blood pressure rise and pulse when loaded words have been used to diminish him. (Russell Baker)

 Conversely, a specific beginning should make the audience interested in finding out what general issue is at stake, e.g.:

 (498) A handsome brownstone house is being razed across the street from us, thrusting us into conflict between two seemingly irreconcilable groups. (Caskie Stinnett)

(499) One hot night in the summer of 1949, I climbed to my usual perch in the cramped press box above the wooden stand of the baseball park in Lumberton, North Carolina. (Tom Wicker)

 These detailed beginnings later lead to the general topic of old ways of life disappearing.

     2.8 The personal essay seeks relevance especially by taking sides on a problematic human issue (cf. VI.2.1). This problem is an uncertain {302} (and  hence dynamic) situation affecting the beliefs and goals of many people. Audiences enjoy controversy, especially if the writer seems to support their own belief system (cf. III.3.15). Topic shifts are free to move toward any content the writer feels will support the thesis, e.g., historical trends illustrated by urban clearance (498) or by baseball leagues (499). The continuation of (496) is a collection of incidents in the author’s life that can represent ‘change and mobility’. The “truth” of the general thesis about the human condition is strengthened by the truth of one’s real-life experiences. The essay ends when the thesis seems sufficiently well-supported.

    2.9 The stages of scientific exposition reflect a different approach to stating and supporting a thesis. The content of the thesis is usually far more specific than that treated in the personal essay, so that supporting materials are in turn extremely detailed, and the writer’s experiences play a much smaller part. The customary beginning is to announce the problem. One’s own thesis can be presented by itself (500), saved for later (501), or contrasted with its predecessors and rivals (502):  

(500) A basic theme of this report is that early school experience is probably the most important stage in a child’s educational career. (Cicourel, 1974: 1)

(501) In this Chapter I am concerned with the placement of students in particular classes. (Leiter, 1974: 17)

(502) In recent years cognitive psychology has shaken off the artificial limitations of its subject matter and methodology that had impaired its progress. [... ] It is not enough to describe behavior in certain well-controlled laboratory situations; such descriptions must be powerful and general enough to deal with a much broader range of observations about cognition and language derived from other disciplines. (Kintsch, 1974: 1)

The audience can decide at once if the problem is interesting or relevant enough to warrant reading more. For the scientist, relevance is also specialized, as befits the topic.

     2.10 The middle of a scientific text brings in evidence to support the writer’s thesis according to much stricter conventions than in the personal essay. At the end, the writer sums up the evidence brought forth and the reasons why it justifies a conclusion about the problem and its solution:  

(500a) Objectivity is claimed in standardized testing conditions by holding constant or eliminating cultural background conditions and socially relevant features. These so-called objective measures do not recognize that each child’s performance is a product of each child’s conception of his own language abilities and social understanding as they interlace with the natural intrusions and contributions of the learning or testing setting as socially defined by adults. (Cicourel, 1974: 16):