Authorial and Text Style

Text 1: A short extract from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

(1)His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs.
(2)His cheek-bones were high and wide, and strong deep lines cut down his cheeks, in
curves beside his mouth. (3)His lower lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips
stretched to cover them, for this man kept his lips closed. (4)His hands were hard, with
broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells. (5)The space between
thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus.
(John Steinbeck , The Grapes of Wrath, Ch. 1)
Text 2: A short extract from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
(1)Mr Bingley was good-looking and gentleman-like; he had a pleasant countenance, and
easy, unaffected manners. (2)His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion.
(3)His brother-in-law, Mr Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr Darcy
soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble
mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within six minutes after his
entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. (4)The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine
figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr Bingley, and he was
looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust
which turned the tide of his popularity: for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his
company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then
save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to
be compared with his friend.
(Jane Austen , Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 3)
Text 3: A short extract from D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy
(1)But Granny held her in her power. (2) And Aunt Cissie's one object in life was to look
after the Mater.
(3)Aunt Cissie's green flares of hellish hate would go up against all young things,
sometimes. (4)Poor thing, she prayed and tried to obtain forgiveness from heaven.(5) But
what had been done to her, she could not forgive, and the vitriol would spurt in her veins
sometimes.
(6)It was not as if Mater were a warm, kindly soul. (7)She wasn't. (8)She only seemed it,
cunningly. (9)And the fact dawned gradually on the girls. (10)Under her old-fashioned lace
cap, under her silver hair, this old woman had a cunning heart, seeking for ever her own
female power. (11)And through the weakness of the unfresh, stagnant men she had bred,
she kept her power, as the years rolled on, from seventy to eighty, and from eighty on the
new lap, towards ninety.
(D.H. Lawrence , The Virgin and the Gypsy, Ch. 1)
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Text 4. Look at the sequence of four sentences below. What level of language is being used
to create the variations in style here? What style label do you think characterises the
different sequences and how is each style being created?
1. The door opened. A large man appeared. He was wearing a floppy hat. He was
eating a sandwich.
2. The door opened, a large man appeared, wearing a floppy hat, eating a
sandwich.
3. The door opened and a large man appeared. And he was wearing a floppy hat
and eating a sandwich.
4. Door open. Large man. Floppy hat. Eating sandwich.
Text 5. Below is an example of how, in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, the
character Mr Podsnap talks to foreigners:
'How Do You Like London?'
What can we tell from the graphological choice about the style in which he speaks to
foreigners?

Our Answer To task F

The consistent graphological style oddity is that every word begins with a
capital letter. This suggests that each word in the sentence has to be
pronounced in a way that gives them high, and equal importance.
This leads us to imagine someone speaking (a) more slowly than usual,
(b) louder than usual, (c) using a primary stress for each word, no matter
what its lexical/grammatical status (and perhaps even a seperate
intonation unit for each word?) and (d) with lengthened pronunciation of
the words or even slight pauses between the words.

Task D - Our Answer

The style changes here are based on grammatical variation. By and large,
the lexis does not change.
Example 1 is a simple style. Each sentence is a simple sentence,
consisting of just one clause each.
In 2, we have an example of parataxis, or a listing structure. There is one
sentence, containing four clauses (the equivalent of the four simple
sentences in 1), each of which is juxtaposed, or listed together (cf. the
commas).
In 3 we have the style which is often called a 'co-ordinating' or 'additive'
style. Each of the two sentences has two clauses coordinated together by
'and', and the second sentences is also 'joined' to the first by 'and'.
In 4 we have a style we might call 'elliptical'. We have four sentences, as
in 1, but this time (a) the grammatical words, (b) some word-internal
grammatical markers and (c) some of the lexical words which carry less
information (cf. 'appeared') are omitted. Elliptical sentences are often
used to create 'impressionistic' styles of description.

For each passage, count the number of words in each sentence and record them by filling
in the relevant cells in the table below. How does what you find correlate with your initial
impressions of the styles of the different passages? Compare your conclusions with ours
below. You can find a link to the passages under 'Useful Links' on the left hand menu.
Note that, for comparative purposes, we have given you a sentence
length average 'norm' for prose writing, calculated in the 1970s by a
Swedish linguist called Ellegrd. His "norm" was based on a 1 million
words corpus of 20th century American English writing called the Brown
Corpus (the corpus was collected at Brown University in 1964).

Our Statistical Comparison of the passages

Category
Words
Sentences
S-Length average

Austen Steinbeck Lawrence

168

92

149

11

42

18.4

13.5

Ellegrd Norm

17.8

Task A - Initial impressions: Steinbeck passage

For us, this writing style seems very simple, external and objective. It is
about as near as you could get to a neutral description of a photograph of
a person. Of course it is impossible to get completely neutral descriptions
of people, and to choose to portray someone in a neutral way is itself a
style choice compared with describing the same person in other ways. But
all that said, and in spite of the fact that photographs can also be taken in
different, and biased ways, the reading impression here appears to be of
simple, external, relatively neutral, photograph-like description of a
person. Below are our rough estimates of where the writing would come
on the various scales we indicated (our scores for the passage are
highlighted and indicated in bold):
Prosaic

7 Poetic

Objective

7 Biased

External

7 Internal

Simple

7 Complex

Straightforward

7 Rhetorical

You may not get exactly the same scores as us (you may not have
understood the scales in exactly the same way as us), but we think you
will also have pretty low figures on the scales indicated. It would be
possible to be even more prosaic (by removing the 'cut' metaphor in
sentence 2 and the simile in sentence 4), but even very prosaic
descriptions are not entirely bereft of 'poetic' features, and so we scored 1
for Prosaic - Poetic. Similar things could be said about the other scales we
scored 1 for (for example, the information about the man keeping his
mouth closed is a small piece of information which could not be seen
externally). But we are just after initial impressions for comparative
purposes here. The reason we decided to score the passage with a 2 for
Simple - Complex is because, although the passage is very simple, it could
have been made even simpler by, for example, removing the coordination
between the two main clauses in sentence 1 and producing two simple
sentences ('His eyes were very dark brown. There was a hint of brown
pigment in his eyeballs.) A similar operation could have been undertaken
for sentence 2, and sentence 3 could have been rewritten as 'His lower lip
was long. His teeth protruded and the lips stretched over the teeth. This
man kept his lips closed.' This operation would have removed some of the
coordination and also the small amount of grammatical complexity in the
sentence (we will cover grammatical complexity in Topic 7)
Because the external description of the man is so simple and
straightforward, we tend to view him as simple and straightforward too,
which turns out to be appropriate as the Tom Joad is a working class Okie
migrant to California, an honest man, mistreated by others.

Authorial and Text Style

Task A - Initial impressions: Jane Austen passage

For us, the style of this character description is very different from the
Steinbeck one. It is much more complex, rhetorical and dynamic. It is not
photographic, because a lot of the information we receive is about the
attitudes of people to one another. This information is not external, but
social and, to some degree, psychological. These people are not described
externally in a moment, but characterised in terms of their changing
social attitudes to one another over an evening. The descriptions of the
people are also portrayed in a value-laden and heavily ironic style. Jane
Austen leaves us in no doubt as to the attitudes we, as readers, are meant
to have towards the characters described.
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Our rough characterisation of the style of this passage using the style
scales we asked you to consider would be:
Prosaic

7 Poetic

Objective

7 Biased

External

7 Internal

Simple

7 Complex

Straightforward

7 Rhetorical

We can see that we get a very different kind of text here compared with
the Steinbeck one. Not much evidence of poetic features here either, but
this passage is considerably more biased, complex and rhetorical. The
only reason we have not award 7s for the last two scales is that we can
think of a number of writers who are even more complex and rhetorical.
We gave a slightly lower score on the Internal - External scale because
there is some external description of the characters and what they do.
Although these judgements are rough and instinctive, note how applying
the same detailed style scales to different writers helps to begin to explain
the character of their writing.
There are a number of different characters in this passage, some of whom
are not named. This is one of the ways in which Jane Austen's description
is more complex than the Steinbeck one (more complex doesn't mean
better, of course, just different). For the main character, Mr Darcy, we
have conflicting impressions, which is connected to the complexity of the
writing. He is handsome and rich, which is prototypical for the male hero
in romance fiction. But he also has an apparently unpleasant character,
which goes against our prototypical hero assumptions. However, things
are even more complicated than that: our view of him as unpleasant
appears to be based on the perceptions of the unnamed characters,
through whose eyes we see him. And it is not clear that we can trust those
judgements - the other people at the gathering appear to like him initially
because he is handsome and rich, rather than because of his intrinsic
qualities. So we may not be able to trust their later, negative, judgements
either. These misgivings are strengthened by the rhetorical, ironising style
that the writing has. If you know the whole novel, you will know that Mr
Darcy's apparent haughtiness is eventually explained through his
attempts to act morally and properly at all times, and of course the rightthinking heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett, is the first to appreciate
him for what he really is, and ends up marrying him. But the irony we
have already noticed (and which we will need to analyse further) suggests
that this novel is not just a romance where the heroine gets her man. It
combines romance, and a happy ending, with biting social critique.
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Authorial and Text Style

Task A - Initial impressions: Lawrence passage

If the Jane Austen passage was biased, this one is arguably even more so.
We are left in no doubt about how to think of the two main characters
portrayed. The characters are described entirely in internal terms (an
although it should be pointed that, unlike the other two passages, this
description is not the very first for the characters concerned, even their
first descriptions in the story were as much in internal as external terms).
Our style characterisation chart for this passage is:
Prosaic

7 Poetic

Objective

7 Biased

External

7 Internal

Simple

7 Complex

Straightforward

7 Rhetorical

In terms of sentence construction, this passage feels much simpler to us

than the Austen passage, but not as simple as the Steinbeck. But it is
even more overtly rhetorical than the Austen, and feels more poetic,
partly because of the strength of the emotions portrayed and partly
because a number of the constructions are unusual semantically (cf. the
metaphors in 'green flares of hellish hate' 'cunning heart' and 'unfresh,
stagnant men').
Aunt Cissie is clearly the daughter of Granny, and refers to her as the
Mater. Aunt Cissie appears to be pretty unpleasant, her mother is even
more so. And, unlike the Austen description, the relations among the
characters has more to do with strong emotional feelings than social
matters - although we should note that their different names (the old lady
is called 'Granny' by her grandchildren and 'Mater' by the children's Aunt
Cissie) indicate clear family relations among the characters.

Task D - Lexical analysis

Clearly, part of the analysis of style must involve statistical comparisons.
This is the only way you can sensibly display style tendencies which one
writer has, compared with others, over his or her writing as a whole. But it
is also important to look at the qualitative aspects of the writing and,
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indeed, this is particularly important when we want to reveal text style,

with its local meanings and effects, rather than authorial style. So from
this task onwards we look at qualitative as well as quantitative aspects.
Now look in more detail at the lexis of each passage and compare what
you find with (a) your initial impressions gathered in Task A, and (b) what
we say for each passage. We suggest that you look at the following:
1. Is the vocabulary composed mainly of basic, common-core terms
(e.g. table, tree, eye) or more abstract, learned or specialised terms
(e.g. faith, metaphor, neutron)?
2. What areas of our vocabulary (semantic fields) do the words relate
to (e.g. the body, education, science, morality)? Remember that the
semantic fields you notice may sometimes be general (e.g.
vegetation) and sometimes more specific (e.g. trees).
3. What words, if any, are repeated, and how often?
4. How complex is the lexis (the complexity of words can be measured
by counting the number of syllables in each word)?
Look at each of the passages in turn, considering all of the above aspects
of lexis. Then compare your findings with ours before moving on to the
next extract.
View our analysis of:

The lexis of the Steinbeck passage also feels very simple in lexical terms. There are three
main reasons for this.
Firstly, most of the words are from our basic common-core
vocabulary (e.g. 'eyes', 'brown', 'little'), giving the vocabulary a
very basic feel. Arguably the only exception is 'protruded', though
''pigment' might also be included.
Secondly, the lexis is restricted almost entirely to body parts and
their physical qualities, and hence to the physical bodily description
of the man being described (notice how focused the description
seems). There are a few repetitions of lexically full words, all
referring to physical attributes of the man ('brown', 'lips', 'hands'
and the morpheme 'eye' in 'eyes' and 'eyeballs'), which emphasise
the restriction of the description to the man's physical appearance.
The only other repetitions are of grammatical words, with 'his' being
particularly prominent (occurring 10 times (11%) in 92 words). This
also indicates how much the focus of the description is restricted to
just one individual.
Thirdly, the words in the passage are very simple in structural
terms. We can show this by looking at the syllable structure of the
words in the passage. Below we repeat the Steinbeck passage to
show the syllable structure of the words in it. Single-syllable words
8

are printed normally. But we have coloured 2-syllable words green

and 3-syllable words red.

Syllable count
His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment in
his eyeballs.(1) His cheek-bones were high and wide, and strong deep
lines cut down his cheeks, in curves beside his mouth.(2) His lower lip
was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched to cover
them, for this man kept his lips closed.(3) His hands were hard, with broad
fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells.(4) The space
between thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny
with callus.(5)
Syllable statistics:
1-syllable
words

7
9

(86%)

2-syllable
words

1
2

(12%)

3-syllable
words

(2%)

Total words

9
2

(100
%)

There are no words at all which are longer than three syllables.
This passage is thus very simple in lexical terms. The vast majority of
words have only one syllable, and there are no words at all more than
three syllables long (compare 'unequivocal' and 'intergalactic', which have
five syllables each and 'antirevolutionary' and 'unenthusiastically', which
have eight syllables each). So the evidence from the syllable structure of
words parallels what we found when we looked at sentence length.

The lexis of the Austen passage also feels more complex than the Steinbeck in lexical
terms.
There is considerably less evidence of our common-core vocabulary.
Although we do get common-core words like 'sisters' and 'women',
even these words may feel a bit less basic than 'eye' and 'brown',
and we also see many words which are more learned and more
abstract (e.g. 'countenance', 'attention', 'noble, 'circulation', 'mien',
'admiration', 'forbidding;', 'disagreeable'). These more learned
words are usually derived from Latin and Greek (mainly via French
9

borrowings into English after the Norman conquest in the Middle

Ages), whereas our more 'basic' words are usually Germanic in
origin, and existed in Old English prior to the Norman invasion.
The semantic areas which the lexis is related to are social relations,
social talk, perceptions and judgements. Indeed, while the
Steinbeck lexis could best be characterised as physically
descriptive, the Austen lexis is highly evaluative in terms of the
perceptions of others and social qualities (e.g. 'good-looking',
'pleasant', 'fine' 'disagreeable', 'unworthy').
The patterns of repetition and related phenomena in the passage bring
out some of the semantic areas referred to above which the descriptions
focus on: social relations, perceptions of others and value terms (below
we treat singulars and plurals together and also different forms of the
same verb):
Mr
4
gentleman/men 3
3
looked/ing
3
fine
2
countenance

manner
s
Bingley
friend
above

2
2
2
2

But in this passage there is another kind of repetition which is absent from
the Steinbeck passage. We have a number of examples of different words
or phrases being used to refer to the same, or very similar things. This
kind of 'repetition using different words' is usually referred to as elegant
variation. Examples are:
'good-looking' and 'pleasant countenance' (of Mr Bingley, S1)
'gentleman-like' and 'easy, unaffected manners' (of Mr Bingley, S1)
'fine tall person', 'handsome features' and 'noble mien' (of Mr
Darcy, S3)
'fine figure of a man' and 'handsomer than Mr Bingley' (of Mr Darcy,
S4)
'proud' 'above his company' and 'above being pleased' (of Mr
Darcy, S4)
'forbidding' and 'disagreeable' (of Mr Darcy's countenance, S4)
'looked' and 'drew the attention' (S3), 'looked at' (S4), 'discovered'
(S4)
'pronounced', 'declared' (these are all verbs related to the
perceptions of those looking at the two men and what they said
about them [social judgements])
These elegant variations focus on the physical and social perception of
the two men by others in the room and involve a considerable amount of
10

evaluative lexis too. Hence the elegant variation brings out the same
semantic areas as the repetition, but in a different, more complex way,
which emphasises the changing perceptions of the people in the room
towards the two men being described, Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy. This helps
to bring out the fact that this description is not an objective, photographlike description, of the sort we saw with Steinbeck, but rather one
involving the perceptions, values and prejudices of other characters. This
all helps to explain our intuitive assessment of this passage as much more
complex and biased.
Finally, the words in the passage are more complex than the Steinbeck in
structural terms. Below we give comparative syllable counts, as we did for
the Steinbeck passage.

Syllable count
We have coloured the 2-syllable words green, the 3-syllable words red, the
4-syllable words purple and the 5-syllable words blue:
Mr Bingley was good-looking and gentleman-like; he had a pleasant
countenance, and easy, unaffected manners.(1) His sisters were fine
women, with an air of decided fashion.(2) His brother-in-law, Mr
Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr Darcy soon drew
the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features,
noble mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within
five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.(3)
The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the
ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr Bingley, and he was
looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his
manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity: for he
was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above
being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then
save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance,
and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.(4)
Syllable statistics:
We also provide the Steinbeck figures below for comparison.
Words

Austen

Steinb
eck

1-syllable
words

10
6

(63%)

(86%)

2-syllable
words

41

(24%)

(12%)

11

3-syllable
words

13

(8%)

(2%)

4-syllable
words

(4%)

(0%)

5-syllable
words

(1%)

(0%)

Total words

16
8

(100
%)

(100%)

The single-syllable proportion in the Austen passage is much lower than

the Steinbeck passage (a bit less than three quarters in proportional
terms). The 2-syllable figures are twice the 12% of the Steinbeck passage,
the 3-syllable proportion is four times higher than Steinbeck's 2%, and
there are a number of 4- and 5-syllable words as well (the Steinbeck
passage has none of these). Hence the syllable-count comparison
consistently reveals that the Austen passage has more complex words as
well as more complex sentences (as we saw in task B), and so confirms
our intuitive judgement that this writing is pretty complex overall.

Like the Austen passage, the Lawrence passage concentrates on social relations (though
more narrowly, within a family: cf 'Granny' 'Aunt', 'Mater'). And also like the Austen, we
are involved in the value-laden perceptions and attitudes of characters (and the narrator) to
another character (though this time the lexis is much stronger emotionally, and as much
psychological as to do with social (family) power: cf. 'hellish hate', 'vitriol', 'cunning',
'power'). These semantic fields can be seen in the lexical repetitions (again, different
grammatical forms of the same lexical item are grouped together):
power
Aunt
Cissie
Mater
sometime
s
old

3
2
2
2
2

under
eighty
thing
cunning

2
2
2
2
2

forgive

The repetitions in this passage are not quite as revealing as in the other
two passages as some of the repetitions ('sometimes', 'thing') are not
very specific, but nonetheless, the pattern of repetitions relate reasonably
well to the dominant semantic fields we have already mentioned.
Repetition is a well-known aspect of Lawrence's writing style, and when it
is on more significant words it often leads critics to see him as an
insistent, tub-thumping writer.
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Lawrence, like Austen, goes in for elegant variation too, which helps to
explain why his writing seems less simple than Steinbeck's even though
his sentences are shorter:
'Granny' (S1) and 'Mater' S2)
'Aunt Cissie' (S2, S3) and 'poor thing' (S4)
'green flares of hellish hate would go up' (S3) and 'vitriol spurted in her
veins' (S5)
'she prayed' and 'tried to obtain forgiveness from heaven (S4)
'unfresh' and 'stagnant' (S11)
Note that this elegant variation is less extensive and also less complex
than that of Jane Austen, helping to confirm the intuition that the Austen
passage is the most complex of the three. But it does not just show the
viewpoints of different characters to one another. It is also used to bring
out different aspects of the same thing (e.g. Aunt Cissie's prayers why she
prayed). The syllable count for the words in this passage also suggests
that the Lawrence passage is intermediate between the other two in
terms of complexity:

Syllable count
We have coloured the 2-syllable words green, and the 3-syllable words
red:
But Granny held her in her power.(1) And Aunt Cissie's one object in
life was to look after the Mater.(2)
Aunt Cissie's green flares of hellish hate would go up against all young
things, sometimes.(3) Poor thing, she prayed and tried to obtain
forgiveness from heaven.(4) But what had been done to her, she could
not forgive, and the vitriol would spurt in her veins sometimes.(5)
It was not as if Mater were a warm, kindly soul.(6) She wasn't.(7) She
only seemed it, cunningly.(8) And the fact dawned gradually on the
girls.(9) Under her old-fashioned lace cap, under her silver hair, this
old woman had a cunning heart, seeking for ever her own female
power.(10) And through the weakness of the unfresh, stagnant men
she had bred, she kept her power, as the years rolled on, from seventy
to eighty, and from eighty on the new lap, towards ninety.(11)
Syllable statistics:
We also provide the Austen and Steinbeck figures below for comparison.
Words
1-syllable
words

Lawrence
10
8

Aust
en

(73%) (63%)

Steinb
eck
(86%)
13

2-syllable
words

36

3-syllable
words

(3%)

(8%)

(2%)

4-syllable
words

(0%)

(4%)

(0%)

5-syllable
words

(0%)

(1%)

(0%)

14
9

(100
%)

(100
%)

(100%)

Total words

(24%) (24%)

(12%)

Lawrence's proportion of single syllable words is intermediate between

the other two writers. His proportion of two-syllable words is the same as
for Austen, but the three-syllable proportion is nearer Steinbeck's, and like
the Steinbeck passage, the Lawrence extract contains no words at all that
are longer than three syllables.

14