A Question of Style

What is it and why is it important?

In a previous post on links, I shared the following idea:

How tight or loose your links are is a stylistic choice.

But what is style?

For my wife (an extremely talented writer), it’s about one’s ‘voice’ as a writer - it’s a personal thing, as individual and mysterious as a fingerprint.

For an academic colleague and friend, it’s all about following a style guide - do you use an Oxford comma, or do you not? How do you treat in-line quotations, and how is direct speech punctuated? There are rules to follow, and each style guide will differ slightly, but style guides are generally internally consistent, and aim to stand consistently for a particular quality of writing, a particular mode of communication - a ‘house style’, if you like.

As you’ll have guessed by now, this month’s writing competition is all about style, and it invites you to take inspiration from Carol Michelon’s illustration for the section on style in Master the Art and Craft of Writing. Your task is to write two 50-word pieces based on some aspect of her illustration. Both should be on exactly the same topic, each in a very different style. As this is both a course and a competition, I go into some detail below on the history of style, but for the purposes of the competition, keep it simple - and choose between formal, informal and business modes of communication for your entry.

‘Style’ - Illustration by Carol Michelon for Master the Art and Craft of Writing by Leon Conrad

In thinking about style, I revisited the writing of a famous Greek orator. When this orator spoke, people listened. He was one of the earliest writers on style. Before him, style was graded roughly on a three-point scale:

• High (formal, florid)

• Medium (professional, fitted to the occasion)

• Low (informal, casual)

The same distinctions can be found today - we talk of using informal and formal styles of communication, with a business style falling somewhere in the middle. Every element of language and communication affects the tone - the words we choose, the sentence structure, the amount of imagery and figurative language, the precision or laxity of our syntax, our motivation, and the proportion of logos (logical reasoning), pathos (emotion), and ethos (stance, character, values) all have their part to play in defining an overall style in a particular context.

Back in the 2nd Century CE, however, Hermogenes came up with an original system - a seven-part system which started out with ‘Clarity’, and ended up with ‘Gravity’; some parts are subdivided. The full list has been translated as follows:

1. Clarity

2. Grandeur

   1. Magnificence

   2. Asperity

   3. Vehemence

   4. Vigour

   5. Splendour

   6. Circumlocution

3. Beauty

4. Speed

5. Ethos

   1. Simplicity

   2. Sweetness

   3. Subtlety

   4. Modesty

6. Verity

7. Gravity

It struck me when thinking about this that Hermogenes is also credited with writing a textbook of Progymnasmata exercises, a kind of middle-school curriculum that trained young people to become citizens by taking them through a rigorous integrated and integrative series of exercises that followed on from — and was based on — what later became known as the Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Its aim was to encourage them to engage in public speaking — in the fields of politics, law, and in society in general. Either way, Hermogenes was clearly deeply immersed in the Liberal Arts tradition.

Seven Liberal Arts.

Seven types of Style.

I think there’s a connection - one that hasn’t been explored in the literature I’ve engaged with to date. Could it be that the first three (Clarity, Grandeur, and Beauty) link to Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric? And that the last four (Speed, Ethos, Verity, and Gravity) link to the Quadrivial subjects? It seems logical to associate Speed with Arithmetic - they’re both things that involve counting and quantitative comparisons; Gravity, with Astronomy. That leaves Music and Geometry, which I see linking with Ethos and Verity, as Ethos is all about harmony and Verity is all about proportion, but other interpretations are possible.

You can play further with the subdivisions fitting in the spaces around and within the sevenfold structure. Try fitting the subsections of Ethos around the subjects of the Trivium:

• Simplicity (… gives rise to …)

  • Logic (… which, expressed with …)

• Sweetness (… gives rise to …)

  • Grammar (… which, when used with …)

• Subtlety (… gives rise to …)

  • Rhetoric (… which, when mastered, demands one speak with …)

• Modesty

And the subsections of Grandeur within the Liberal Arts:

• Logic

Magnificence (combining Logic and Grammar)

• Grammar

Asperity (combining Grammar and Rhetoric)

• Rhetoric

Vehemence (combining Rhetoric and Arithmetic)

• Arithmetic

Vigour (combining Arithmetic and Geometry)

• Geometry

Splendour (combining Geometry and Music)

• Music

Circumlocution (combining Music and Astronomy)

• Astronomy

I see the combinations as a flexible key to meditative engagement rather than being definitive statements of Hermogenes’ intent. The indicators of each of the stylistic types that Hermogenes identifies are worth looking into - and are beyond the scope of this short piece. For now, perhaps they’re best seen as elements to be explored, part of a tree of knowledge that grows beyond a triple gateway that frames our mode of expression, as we see in Carol’s illustration for the section on Style in my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing.

This month’s task, once again, is to write two 50-word pieces based on some aspect of Carol’s illustration. Both should be on exactly the same topic; each in a very different style, choosing between formal, informal and business modes of communication for your entry.

Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises. What do you have to lose?

Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Friday 25th November 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting

This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller Project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story; Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide, a Firebird Award winner, shortlisted for The People’s Book Prize. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell.

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You’ll find an excerpt on line on Reedsy Discovery here.

Please vote for the book in The People’s Book Prize here:

https://peoplesbookprize.com/oct-2022/story-and-structure/

Thank you!

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