Analysis of Style

1
Analysis of Style

• Style The manner in which ideas are expressed,
  the combination of distinctive or unique features
  characterizing a writer or a person.

2
Four areas to consider in analyzing an authors
writing style

• Diction
• Sentence Structure / Structure of Form
• Treatment of Subject Matter
• Figurative Language

3
DictionAnalysis of Word Choice Are the words

• Monosyllabic or polysyllabic?
• Colloquial, informal, formal, or archaic?
• Concrete or abstract?
• Denotative or connotative?
• Euphonius or cacophonous?

4
Examples for Analysis of Diction

• Ships at a distance have every mans wish on
  board. For some they come in with the tide. For
  others they sail forever on the horizon, never
  out of sight, never landing until the Watcher
  turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams
  mocked to death by Time. That is the life of
  men.
• Now, woman forget all those things they dont
  want to remember, and remember everything they
  dont want to forget. The dream is the truth.
  Then they act and do things accordingly.
• --Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale
  Hurston

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Examples of Analysis of Diction

• Night. None prayed, so that the night would
  pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of fire
  that devoured us. Should that fire die out one
  day, there would be nothing left in the sky but
  dead stars, dead eyes.
• There was nothing else to do but to get into
  bed, into the beds of the absent ones to rest,
  to gather ones strength.
• Night, Elie Wiesel

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StructureConsider each of the following

• Sentence Length
• Syntax
• Organization / Form of Passage

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Structure Sentence Length

• Telegraphic (fewer than five words)
• Short (approximately five words)
• Medium (approximately eighteen words)
• Long and involved (thirty words or more)
• Does the sentence fit the subject matter?
• Does length vary?
• Why is sentence length effective? Is it
  effective in this situation?

8
Structure Syntax

• Is there variety?
• Is there a pattern?
• -- Declarative, interrogative, imperative,
  exclamatory
• --Simple, compound, complex compound, complex
• --Loose sentences independent clause comes at
  the beginning
• --Periodic sentences independent clause is the
  last element
• --Balanced sentences phrases and clauses
  balance each other
• --Natural order or inverted order of sentence
• --Juxtaposition normally unassociated ideas,
  words, phrases, next to each other creating
  surprise, wit, clever statement
• --Parallel structure
• --Repetition of to enhance rhythm or to create
  emphasis

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StructureOrganization / Form of Passage

• Form (In prose this might be stream of
  conscieousness in poetry, a sonnet.)
• Methods of organization in a passage
• --Chronological
• --Cause and Effect
• --Association

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Examples for Analysis of Structure

• Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I dont
  know. I got a telegram form the home Mother
  deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.
  That doesnt mean anything. Maybe it was
  yesterday.
• The old peoples home is in Marengo, about
  eighty kilometers from Algiers. Ill take the
  two oclock bus and get there in the afternoon.
  That way I can be there for the vigil and come
  back tomorrow night.
• The Stranger, Albert Camus

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Examples for Analysis of Structure

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of
  times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age
  of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
  was the epoch of incredulity, it was the spring
  of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
  everything before us, we had nothing before us,
  we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all
  going direct the other way in short, the period
  was so far like the present period, that some of
  its noisiest authorities insisted on its being
  received, for good or for evil, in the
  superlative degree of comparison only.
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

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Treatment of Subject Matter

• Point of View
• Participant Point of View (1st person)
• Can be a major or minor character
• Special kinds innocent eye of narrator (a
  child or someone who is naïve) or a stream of
  consciousness narrator (internal monologue)
• Non-Participant Point of View (3rd person)
• Omniscient enters the minds of others
• Limited omniscient limited to minds of a few
  characters
• Objective enters no characters mind, only
  tells what can be seen or heard

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Treatment of Subject Matter(Continued)

• Tone the writers or speakers attitude toward
  the subject tone is key to writing about
  literature. Diction, imagery (also called
  detail), and language determine tome.
• Irony subtle perception of inconsistency, in
  which an apparently straightforward statement or
  event is undermined by its context so as to give
  it a very different significance.
• Mood or Atmosphere the state of mind, the
  feeling or impression that the reader derives
  from the passage. Atmosphere is the direct
  impression the setting produces on the reader.
• Support of Main Idea opinion, experiences,
  observation, reading, expert witness, statistical
  data

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Examples for Analysis of SubjectMatter

• When I was little I would think of ways to kill
  my daddy. I would figure out this or that way
  and run it down through my head until it got
  easy. The way I liked best was letting go a
  poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him
  and hed be dead and swollen up and I would
  shudder to find him so. But I did not kill my
  daddy. He drank his own self to death the year
  after the County moved me out. All I did was
  wish him dead real hard every now and then. And
  I can say for a fact that I am better off now
  than when he was alive.
• --Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons

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Examples for Analysis of Treatment of Subject
Matter

• Once upon a time and a very good time it was
  there was a moocow coming down along the road and
  this moocow that was coming down along the road
  met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . . .
• His father told him that story his father
  looked at him through a glass he had a hairy
  face. He was baby tuckoo,
• --A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
• James Joyce

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Figurative Language

• Alliteration Oxymoron
• Assonance Pun
• Consonance Irony
• Simile Metaphor Sarcasm
• Personification Antithesis
• Onomatopoeia Apostrophe
• Hyperbole Allusion
• Litotes Synecdoche
• Paradox Metonymy

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Example for Analysis of Figurative Language

• Oh but I do remember when I was scared.
  Everything was so wrong like somebody had knocked
  something loose and my family was shaking itself
  to death. Some wild ride had broken and the one
  in charge strolled off and let us spin and shake
  and fly off the rail. And they both died tired
  of the wild crazy spinning and wore out and sick.
  Now you tell me if that is not a fine style to
  die in. She sick and he drunk with the moving.
  They finally gave in to the motion and let the
  wind take them from here to there.
• Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons

18
Example for Analysis of Style

• It was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was
  full of it and of the smell of his fathers cigar
  as they sat on the front gallery after supper
  until it would be time for Quentin to start,
  while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda
  the fireflies blew and drifted in soft random
  the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr.
  Compsons letter would carry up from Mississippi
  and over the long iron New England snow and into
  Quentins sitting room at Harvard. It was a day
  of listening too the listening, the hearing in
  1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew
  since he had been born in and still breathed the
  same air in which the church bells had rung on
  the Sunday morning in 1833.
• --Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner