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intended purpose. The boldface terms in the chart are featured throughout the anthology and are included in the glossary.
Tone, or the author’s attitude toward a subject, is also an important element of style. Words such as “sympathetic,” “comic,” “passionate,” or “harsh” can be used to describe the attitude of the writer. The tone helps determine the text’s intellectual and emotional impact on the reader. Irony is one of the dominant tones of literature in the 20th century. Irony reflects the sadness or humor resulting from the gap between life as it is idealized and life as it is. Generally, irony is used to criticize some aspect of society or to reveal the silliness of people’s behavior. Irony also results from unusual or unexpected points of view, oddly humorous situations, and shocking revelations or sudden turns of event. Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, and T. Coraghessan Boyle are among many whose use of irony is sometimes comical and sometimes bitingly satirical.
Style also includes the way a writer uses language. Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe and Maya Angelou, are said to be lyrical—that is, expressing intense personal emotions in much the same way as a songwriter or poet. Some, such as Raymond Carver, let the events of the story speak for themselves without much interpretation from the author. Others, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, are labeled energetic, writing in a way that is so highly charged the reader has little choice but to go along for the ride.
Other contributions to style include an author’s use of dialogue, dialect, colloquialisms, and bilingualism. Likewise, style is reflected as authors craft their writing with careful diction, varied sentence complexity, and intentional punctuation. Truman Capote once wrote, “I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.” This attention to diction and placement of punctuation is seen in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Juan Felipe Herrera.
Consider Faulkner’s long, sometimes convoluted sentences that convey the dynamic intensity of his characters’ thoughts and emotions while their dialogue is written in the rural vernacular of his native Mississippi. The rhythm of Yiddish storytelling is reflected in the prose of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The speech of Katherine Anne Porter’s characters often reflects her roots in rural Texas and the languages of Mexico and other countries in which she lived. Ultimately, how you respond to the author’s style contributes greatly to the pleasure of reading. As American poet Robert Frost put it, “All the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
On Style xv