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Style, Tone and Irony. Style. Style refers to the distinctive manner in which a writer arranges words to achieve particular effects. This includes individual word choices and matters such as the length of sentences, their structure and tone, and the use of irony. Diction.
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Style • Style refers to the distinctive manner in which a writer arranges words to achieve particular effects. This includes individual word choices and matters such as the length of sentences, their structure and tone, and the use of irony.
Diction • Diction refers to a writer’s choice of words. Different words evoke different associations in a reader’s mind. The diction must be appropriate to the characters and the situations in which the author places them.
Syntax • Syntax is another element of writing style. For example, in “Soldier’s Home,” Hemingway expresses Krebs’s thoughts the way Krebs thinks. “ He had tried to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene maybe before he got away.” The style avoids any “complicated” sentence structures. This style reflects Krebs’s determination to make, one step at a time, a clean, unobstructed break from his family and the entangling complications associated with them.
Tone • Style reveals tone, the author’s implicit attitude toward the people, places, and events in a story. • If a reader is sensitive to tone, they can get behind a character and see him or her from the author’s perspective. In “Bartleby the Scrivener” everything is told from the lawyer’s point of view, but the tone of his remarks often separates him from the author’s values and attitudes. When the lawyer characterizes himself at the beginning of the story, his use of language effectively allows us to see Melville disapproving of what the lawyer takes pride in: • “ The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity.” • Melville doesn’t tell us that the lawyer is status conscious and materialistic. It is discovered through the tone.
