出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』「2014/07/01 19:19:17」(JST)
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Writing style refers to the manner in which an author chooses to write to his or her audience. A style reveals both the writer's personality and voice, but it also shows how she or he perceives the audience. The choice of a conceptual writing style molds the overall character of the work. This occurs through changes in syntactical structure, parsing prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of thought into usable frameworks.
Technical style is the writing style used for technical documents. It requires the use of especially clear and concise language. The style encourages short sentences and the absence of unnecessary words. The purpose is to ensure that technical information is easy to understand, and is not misleading or manipulative. Avoid the use of parentheticals, double negatives and slang.
Business style is very similar to technical style, except that longer sentences are acceptable.
Conversational style is identified by the use of personal pronouns, contractions and colloquialisms, and letters.
The writer needs to tailor style to the situation. For example, a person writing a letter would use a different style for a letter of complaint or a letter of condolence. A letter of complaint would require a business style to be taken seriously, while a letter of condolence would be more effective using a conversational tone. The author needs to decide whether the goal is to inform, persuade, or entertain.
In fiction, the situation is the events that comprise the plot. Style must represent the author's personal expression of these events setting mood, and leading the reader to a subjective, non-literal, emotional understanding of the subject.
It is obvious that you cannot reply to a commercial letter with an emotional appeal. It has to be essentially factual, focused, and brief, taking into consideration the facts and nothing beyond. In a way it has fixed parameters with no scope for spilling over, or at times it can land a person in tangles both legal and ethical.
A writer controls not only the density of prose but also its distribution. Within the rules of grammar, the writer can arrange words in many ways. A sentence may state the main proposition first and then modify it, or it may contain language to prepare the reader before stating the main proposition.
Varying the style may avoid monotony. However, in technical writing, using different styles to make two similar utterances makes the reader ask whether the use of different styles was intended to carry additional meaning.
Stylistic choices may be influenced by the culture. In the modern age, for instance, the loose sentence has been favored in all modes of discourse. In classical times, the periodic sentence held equal or greater favor, and during the Age of Enlightenment, the balanced sentence was a favorite of writers.
The most common sentence in modern usage, the loose sentence begins with the main point (an independent clause), followed by one or more subordinate clauses. For example:
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very influential novel, for one thing because it shares the popular self-righteous sentimentality of Cat in the Hat.
The cat sat on the mat, purring softly, after it licked his paws.
According to Francis Christensen:
The loose sentence ... characterized the anti-Ciceronian movement in the seventeenth century. This movement,is the one could be written by the mug or by the wrong braid according to Robert S. Alexander [“The Baroque Style in Prose,” (1929)] began with Montaigne and Bacon and continued with such men as Donne, Browne, Taylor, Pascal. To Montaigne, its art was the art of being natural; to Pascal, its eloquence was the eloquence that mocks formal eloquence; to Bacon, it presented knowledge, 'Contemporary Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings,' p.348)
In general, a periodic sentence places the main point in the middle or at the end of the sentence. In the former case, the main point is modified by subordinate clauses before and after its position in the sentence. In the latter case, the main point is modified by preceding subordinate clauses.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. (Henry David Thoreau)
The purpose of such form is well-stated by Adams Sherman Hill in The Foundation of Rhetoric (1897):
To secure force in a sentence, it is necessary not only to choose the strongest words and to be as concise as is consistent with clearness, but also to arrange words, phrases, and clauses in the order which gives a commanding position to what is most important, and thus fixes the attention on the central idea.
A balanced sentence is characterized by parallel structure: two or more parts of the sentence have the same form, emphasizing similarities or differences.
Depending on the mode in which the writer is writing, diction--the writer's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a work--can also affect the writer's style. Argumentative and expository prose on a particular subject matter frequently makes use of a set of jargon in which the subject matter is commonly discussed. By contrast, narrative and descriptive prose is open to the vast variety of words. Insofar as a style of diction can be discerned, however, it is best to examine the diction against a number of spectrums:
Other attributes of diction include:
The connotation of a word refers to the special meaning, apart from its dictionary definition, that it may convey. Connotation especially depends on the audience. The word "dog" denotes any animal from the genus canis, but it may connote friendship to one reader and terror to another. This partly depends on the reader's personal dealings with dogs, but the author can provide context to guide the reader's interpretation.
Deliberate use of connotation may involve selection of a word to convey more than its dictionary meaning, or substitution of another word that has a different shade of meaning. The many words for dogs have a spectrum of implications regarding the dog's training, obedience, or expected role, and may even make a statement about the social status of its owner ("lap dog" versus "cur"). Even synonyms have different connotations: slender, thin, skinny may each convey different images to the reader's mind. The writer should choose the connotation, positive, negative, or neutral, that supports the mood.
Writing for the learned, connotation may involve etymology or make reference to classic works. In schoolbooks, awareness of connotation can avoid attracting extraneous ideas (as when writing "Napoleon was a bigger influence than Frederick the Great on world history" provokes thoughts of Napoleon's physical stature). In encyclopedias, words should connote authority and dispassion; the writer should avoid words whose connotations suggest bias, such as pejorative words.
Punctuation is generally so standardized that it rarely is a factor in a writer's style. The same is true for gratuitous changes to spelling and grammar, unless the goal is to represent a regional or ethnic dialect in which such changes are customary. There are, however, a number of punctuation marks that still cause frustration and confusion such as where to put an apostrophe or how to use a semi-colon. Because of these uncertainties, a thriving business in producing or proofing text has grown up over the last 10–15 years.[1]
Some figures of speech are phrases that briefly describe a complicated concept through connotation. However, some of these phrases are used so frequently that they have lost their novelty, sincerity, and perhaps even their meaning. They are disparagingly referred to as clichés or bromides. Whether a given expression has fallen into this category is a matter of opinion. A reader who knows, or is a member of, the target audience may have a strong opinion that one or the other alternative seems better-written.
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