ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on style, the sum total of language habits distinguishing one text from another. It examines language microscopically, noting how a rhetor uses words and what effects they produce. The chapter investigates tone and nuance, features that audiences sense but cannot describe. Both rhetorical and literary critics study imagery but the imagery in rhetoric is often pedestrian rather than poetic. It roughs out the stylistic terrain and gives the critic a base point against which to compare individual messages. Naturally, there is more to style than syntax. The statistics of grammar cannot alone explain why Webster's address seems dated or why the chain letter seems slippery. Analyzing style is complex because language refuses to reveal its mysteries to the casual observer. Stylistic analysis takes patience: Noting meta-phorical clusters, being sensitive to a special use of anaphora. But when stylistic criticism is done well it is a marvelous thing.
