While teaching written communication to international business school students in Korea, the author received an email from a student to lacked thoroughness and clarity. He decided to use the email as a learning opportunity for his students to rewrite it. He discovered that while the results were good, there was an inability to write in a register…

The main idea behind this essay is to reflect on different styles of academic writing by giving an account of a single article published in an established international journal. A threefold analysis was performed measuring the distribution of personal pronouns with animate v. inanimate reference, descriptive v. classifying adjectives, and active…

The present study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Persian language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast by Iranian EFL students. 65 English paragraphs written by the participants, who were at the intermediate level based on their…

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions)…

"Writeability" is concerned with helping writers and editors produce materials on easier readability levels. A major input of most readability formulas is vocabulary difficulty. One way to increase readability is to use simple vocabulary or shorter words since word frequency studies show that more common words are shorter. The other…

Although the nature of topicalization is complex and cannot be easily separated from considerations of syntactic structure and sentence focus, analysis of language usage has indicated that topicalization is more a stylistic than a syntactic process. Topicalization refers to moving a noun phrase (NP) into the initial position of a sentence.…

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

Stylistics, the art of making effective choices in writing, depends on synonymy. This means that writers, depending on the purpose, the audience, and the context of their messages, will rephrase those messages to improve their effectiveness. Paraphrasing messages to fit the needs of particular situations depends on a number of stylistic variables…

Revision of a paper presented at meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Minneapolis, Minn., April 1968).

IN ADDITION TO GIVING A COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF VIETNAMESE, THIS TEXT CONTAINS A STUDY OF VIETNAMESE PRONUNCIATION, BASED ON THE EDUCATED SPEECH OF HANOI, WHICH IS CONSIDERED STANDARD. ANOTHER ENTIRE SECTION IS DEVOTED TO DIALECTAL DIFFERENCES, SPECIFICALLY TO COMPARISONS WITH THE SPEECH OF SAIGON. ALL PHONOLOGY IS…

Offers examples of appropriate and improper use of the passive voice in technical communications and gives suggestions for using these examples in technical writing classrooms. (RL)

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)