ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘individual style’ foregrounds individual difference. Handwriting is in fact a good example of individual style. As histories of handwriting show, it has always been socially regulated, through the ways it has been taught in the school system, everybody has their own recognizable handwriting, their own individual style. The idea of ‘social style’ foregrounds the social determination of style, the idea that style expresses, not individual personality and attitudes, but social position, ‘who we are’ in terms of stable categories such as class, gender and age, social relations and ‘what we do’ in terms of the socially regulated activities we engage in, and the roles we play within them. Advertising style developed, not just to sell products and services, but also to model the identities and values of consumer society. It was the first ‘corporate’ language variety, and it played a key role in what Fairclough has called the ‘marketization’ of discourse.
