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):