In this video I'd like to talk with you about the concept of style -- literary
style. And to do this we'll have a look at this essay by Malcolm Gladwell, the
prolific essayist and writer. You may have read his some of his books
including "Outliers" or more recently "David and Goliath." Or you may have
listened to his podcast Revisionist History. He's a very good writer but
he also has a particular style. So we'll use him as a sort of test case to
think about the concept of style. Now there is this saying that clothes make
the man, and you can say something similar about style. I want you to be
able to recognize that different writers have unique kinds of writing
styles. Another quotation that kind of gets at this point is one from the
18th century literary critic Alexander Pope. Pope once wrote that "True wit
(true wittiness and intelligence and and being smart and so on) --
true wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought but never so well
expressed." In other words, people might have had the same idea, but they've never
seen it expressed so well and so part of writing is simply the expression, the way
in which you bring ideas forward. Let's have a look then at what Malcolm
Gladwell has to say and we'll just look at the opening mostly and try to
get a little bit of a sense of the stylistic tics that make his
writing work. Okay, so he starts by writing, "At four-thirty in the afternoon on
Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter
at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina." Phew -- that's a lot of
details! Do we need that many details to get at this story, especially since most
of the story, as we find out later, is about social media today. So this is a
little introductory story and we sort of wonder: do we need that much detail?
But there's point to this. What Gladwell is trying to get across is that there is
a kind of delight in knowledge -- that simply facts can
not simply entertain us, but give us a sense of satisfaction, a sense of knowing
or being in the know, that we have done research, that we are reading something
that's meticulous. And so the meticulous nature of this -- that's the kind of
stylistic feature that's coming across (one fact after another).
Does it matter? Well, maybe not, but it does create a certain effect. The next
sentence continues, "They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a
mile or so away." Now ... what this sentence does is it starts with
that kind of factual approach again, but then the last little bit is much more
casual. "A mile or so away." I mean, if he wanted to be exact he could
have given you the exact kilometer mark or mile mark. [That] wouldn't be that
difficult to do. But why doesn't he do that? Because he's trying to seem casual
here. He's trying to do two things at once. He wants to be savvy and smart and
and so on and then he also wants to seem casual and on your side. And that's
why a lot of people when they read Gladwell they find him actually a bit
smug sounding sometimes. This is a little bit of the style of The New
Yorker, that kind of urbane styled where where the writers are trying to seem, you
know, suave and elegant, and both witty and knowledgeable and all of these
things at the same time and that can come across as a little bit annoying as
well. So he continues ... he writes, "'I'd like a cup of coffee, please' one of the four,
Ezell Blair said to the waitress." Do we need to know his name? I don't know.
"'we don't serve Negroes here," she replied. the Woolworth's lunch counter was a long
L-shaped bar that could seat 66 people with a stand-up snack bar at one end."
Does that matter? I mean, that detail is completely irrelevant to the rest of the
story. But again, there's this sort of delight in just giving you these facts.
Sixty-six people exactly! Who really cares? "The seats were for whites. The snack bar
was for blacks." And then we read on. So I think you can start to get a little
bit of a sense now of the kind of writing style here, but we're going to
dig in a little bit more and try to get at grammatically what makes these
sentences tick. One of the things that you'll notice is that these sentences
are typically quite short. "The seats were for whites. "The snack bar was
for blacks." Even when they are longer the sentence structure is quite simple. A lot
of these sentences are simple sentences. They don't actually have a lot of
dependent clauses a lot of these sentences -- if they do add information
it's mostly in phrases and not independent clauses. Now you can go
through the article and see that this plays out quite consistently I think. If
you look at the subjects of the sentences they are also typically
quite straightforward. So the first one: "four college students" -- there's our
subject. Then we have "they were freshmen" -- "they." The next one: "one of the four said."
So "one of the four" is the subject. "She replied" -- "she" is the subject.
Or "we don't serve Negroes" -- "we" is the subject. We have "the lunch counter" as the
subject, "the seats," "the snack bar." Almost all the subjects are just two or three
words at the most. And so that makes it very easy to read, even if we have all of
these other details tacked on. Same thing with the verbs. The main verbs are
typically very straightforward. If you go through this, it says "sat" in
the first sentence. "They were" -- so "were." We have "I'd like ... said ... we don't
serve ... replied ... was," and one interesting thing here is that there's a
lot of linking verbs here like "was" and "were" and so on. In an
academic essay a lot of people would tend to stay away from those because if
you have too many "is" and "was" and "were" and so on, people might accuse
you of not being very exact. You might say, for instance, "The seats were reserved
for whites" or "the snack bar was meant only for blacks," but Malcolm
Gladwell's fine with that. And that's because he does create that little
bit more of a casual effect and he feels that there's enough detail here that
this can sustain itself and that we don't necessarily need those more
specific verbs, and that's fine. So that is something to think about then as you
write your sentences. Can you reduce the sentence to a simple subject and a simple
verb, and build it up from there? You don't have to do that of course all the
time, but it is something to be really conscious of in terms of style. Another
thing to notice as well is that Malcolm Gladwell rarely uses what are called
expletives, and by expletives we don't mean swear words here. We mean these
phrases that start with "there was" or "there is" or "it is" or "it was." He
doesn't do that because those are very weak phrases. He could have
said, "There were seats that were reserved for whites," but no, he picks a simple
subject (the seats) and runs with that. So watch out for expletives in your own
writing. Try not to start with these weak kinds of phrases. Another
thing to think about is to vary the length of your sentences, and you can see
here that some of these sentences are very short and the effect of that is to
really speed up the process of reading. A short sentence acts like a kind of pause
or a breath -- a breath of fresh air.
So think of your reader as having to breathe as he or she reads
your piece, and those short sentences allow the reader to kind of catch up and
process things and then speed up again. So pace and rhythm and and breathing --
these things really matter in writing. And try to vary your sentence
length. Another thing to think about is that if you are using more
complicated sentences, you may want to think about creating some sense of
structure that works and one thing you can do for instance is to create a
parallel sense of structure. If we read here it says, "When ten thousand
protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring
2009 to protest against their country's Communist government, the action was
dubbed the Twitter revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had
been brought together." That's a very complex sentence. It starts
with "when this," then we have that, and then we have "because." So the main clause
here is "the action was dubbed the Twitter revolution." So "when this,"
then the action was dubbed, and then the last bit is "because." Now notice what the
next sentence does . It follows the same structure. It says, "A few months
after that, when student protests rocked Tehran ..." So there's the "when" bit: when this
happened. Then we get our main clause: "the State Department took the unusual step
of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site," and then we
get the because clause at the very end. So we call that really parallel
structure. We want these sentences to be quite similar. And it works very
effectively here. Something to think about, but also think about what is in
each clause, because if you if you tie together dependent and independent
clauses, you really want to have your key ideas preferably in the main clause. And
you can see here that the Twitter bit is in each instance in the main clause. So
that is the focus of the attention, although if you add too many dependent
clauses then you run the risk of actually taking the attention away from
that, and so you have to be careful about kind of weighing the balance between
independent and dependent clauses. The other thing to think about is the order
... the order of information. You want to be aware that if you put your
crucial bits way at the end of a sentence, that can have a powerful effect
in terms of ending with something climactic, but it also delays what's
important. And if you do that too much, then the reader is going to struggle to
to really follow your ideas. There are lots of more things we could say about
style, but let's hope that this gets the point across -- that style matters that
style is sort of related to personality, and that if you want to come across in a
certain way then you also want to develop a style
that's somewhat consistent and that fits with who you want to to be basically
when it comes to writing.