Hello, welcome to this presentation. Before this class, I assumed that I ultimately control the style of my writing. I expect that most content creators feel the same way about their videos or music or writing. During this class, my understanding of style came to include the perceiver or consumer as an active ingredient controlling style.As writers, the goal is to always put readers first, as Williams explains in the first chapter of Style. As noble as this precept is, it is also a practical one because as he puts it “a passage means not what the writer intended it to mean, but only what careful and competent readers think it does.” Actually, once in the hands of a consumer, the content is open to any interpretation, or indeed, misinterpretation, willed on it.In this presentation, I talk about how the perceiver affects style in the context of Lanham’s style/substance matrix.About the PictureBy David Crausby on Flickr.com (http://www.flickr.com/photos/crausby/4068987395/in/pool-bodytype).The Poem: SoldierIf I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is forever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.-Rupert Brooke, 1914
The four dimensional style/substance matrix presents style in the context of the following spectra:the signal or text, where the creator has most controlthe perceiver’s choice of attentionthe motives of both creator and perceiverand finally, the life or encompassing reality in which the other three existSo how can the perceiver change style? Let’s try looking AT this matrix itself.
Here’s what I see. Is this what Lanham intended? Does it make sense? Are you seeing the matrix in a new way? My perception not only changes how I interpret the matrix, but maybe how you do as well?
Here’s another visual representation of the matrix – it’s a take on the famous Thinker.
Style is defined as much by the consumer’s expectation as by the producer’s proclivities.For example, a lawyer reading a law brief sits at the through end of the spectrum, where the style is automatically transparent and the attention accorded it is unself-conscious. On the other hand, a political satirist reading the Washington Post sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, where the style is purposely noticed and the attention accorded it is self-conscious.
When style is unexpected to the perceiver, the content can be perceived as wrong or incomplete, even if the information is all there. Perception becomes opaque and negates the content. To a lay person, the same law brief, which was transparent to the lawyer, can be equally opaque and meaningless.
So let’s look at a couple of examples. Recipes are often great examples of through style probably because the perceiver’s motivation is highly purpose-oriented. Cooking the meal is usually the overriding purpose for reading a recipe. Of course, extra care has to be taken by the writer to ensure transparency.
News, on the other hand, strives for attention and therefore makes use of opaque, at styles. For this reason, news headlines are a great source of unintentional double entendres. They render style opaque and make us look at it. Often, they are mistakes and the genesis of all kinds of satire. While the examples here are rather obvious, catching these headlines out is an exercise in looking at rather than through style. I almost never find examples such as these because purpose overrides play when I read the news. But, once read out of context with playful purpose, there’s no going back to the intended meaning. So the context of perception really can change everything.
The perceiver spectrum of style matters to us as communicators because we are communicating to an audience. Apart from considering who the audience is, how the content is perceived also informs how we create it.This spectrum also matters to us as analyzers of prose because we must simultaneously look at as well as through the prose to successfully analyze it. By switching between at and through perception, we derive meaning and make value judgments about prose.Style is the multi-dimensional social substance around content. It is defined not only by the content producer but equally by its consumer. Now, more than ever, with the distance between producer and consumer collapsing, the contexts of perception are critical to our analysis of style.
And so we come to the end of this particular diversion. Thank you for your time!
