I have written this brief piece in response to an enquiry from a respected language practitioner colleague who was asking which of the meanings of ‘skryfwyse’ the English word ‘style’ best conveys, if any at all.

My starting point was Bosman, Van der Merwe and Hiemstra’s Tweetalige Woordeboek, which gives as translations of ‘skryfwyse’, style, manner (of writing), penmanship, but also spelling, spelling system, orthography, etc. So it became apparent that there could possibly be a misfit between ‘skryfwyse’ and ‘style’ that needed to be resolved. This prompted an investigation into the meaning of the word ‘style’, one that turned out to be a fascinating journey.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘style’ as follows:

style: 8 a The characteristic manner of literary expression of a particular writer, school, period, etc. ME. b (Features pertaining to) the form and mode of expression of a text, as opposed to what is said or expressed. ME. 11 b A particular or characteristic way, form, or technique of making or producing a thing, esp. a work of art; a way of executing a task; a manner of performance. E18. ▸ c A type, kind, or sort, esp. with ref. to appearance or form;

Hmmm … I turned next to my ‘grammar bible’ for guidance (John Kahn The Right Word at the Right Time, Reader’s Digest, 1985), and this is what it revealed (at 611):

style, stile

There are two words spelt stile, and it is only through an etymological accident that the word style is not spelt stile as well. … The second stile – ‘an upright support in a panel or frame’ – is probably from the Dutch stijl, ‘a doorpost’, probably in turn derived from the Latin stilus, ‘a pole or post’.

A more common sense of this Latin word stilus was ‘pen’, and it was this sense (extended to ‘manner of writing’ [penmanship, skryfwyse?]) that probably gave rise to the present senses of style: ‘the way in which something is written or done’, and so on.

The Latin stilus became style as well as stile in Old French, probably because it was wrongly associated with the Greek word stulos, ‘a column’ (the Greek vowel upsilon tended to be rendered as a y in French and English derivatives). Hence the spelling style rather than stile in English today.

What a fascinating outcome of this ‘etymological accident’! So it’s not for nothing, then, that one of the classic texts on how to write more effectively, with more style, is entitled The Elements of Style (aka Strunk & White). First crafted by Professor William Strunk, Jr for his English students in 1919 and then published formally in 1957, it comprises

Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused – that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work (at xiii).

Then, at the start of a recently inserted (2000) chapter V ‘An approach to style’, EB White writes (at 97):

Up to this point, the book has been concerned with what is correct, or acceptable, in the use of English. In this chapter, we approach style in its broader meaning: style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. Here we leave solid ground. … There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly. … Style is an increment in writing. When we speak of Fitzgerald’s style, we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper.

 

What I take from these pearls is that our writing style is the unique way each of us writes, what makes our writing – yours, mine and Scott Fitzgerald’s – both ‘distinguished and distinguishing’, backed up by many ‘elements’ of correctness, appropriateness and a way with words, or penmanship. Style includes spellings as one word, two words or hyphenated, US versus UK spelling and word choice, a writer’s preferences for certain punctuation, sentence constructions, the placement of emphasis, etc.

 

But this also means that there can be both good and bad style, and everything in between. Bad style begins, for example, with not identifying your readers and not writing for them, and not considering the medium you are writing for. The results are misfits rather than anything approximating style. Bad style includes writing a paragraph which comprises a number of short sentences that create a staccato effect which unsettles its readers. Or writing sentences comprising 50–100 words and containing a number of subordinate clauses that serve only to separate the subject from the verb it relates to. Or filling sentences with jargon, archaisms and/or noun strings that render them inaccessible or unintelligible. Which means that style is therefore so much more than spelling or orthography.

 

This is where we text editors can – nay, must – come to the rescue by fixing (or helping our authors to fix) such heinous non-style. More than that, though, it is we text editors who must home in on an author’s style and, if it is essentially good, work towards enhancing it by removing and replacing its blemishes. Burnishing it to best advantage. What is indisputable, though, is that we must never subvert an author’s natural style (their voice) by imposing on it our own preferred style.

Feature picture: Freepik

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of PEG.

About JohnDavid Linnegar

John Linnegar has been a text editor, proofreader and indexer of school and academic textbooks, reports and journal articles since the 1970s. For more than 20 years he has trained generations of editors, proofreaders and indexers. During this time, he (co-)wrote several books on aspects of language usage and editing, including Engleish, our Engleish: Common errors in South African English and how to resolve them (2013), Grammar, punctuation and all that jazz (2019) and Text editing: A handbook for students and practitioners (2012). With Consistency, consistency, consistency, he pioneered the series of PEG guides that now numbers five titles. Besides being a PEG Honorary Life Member and an Accredited Text Editor of both SATI and PEG, he is a member of a number of professional associations worldwide, including SENSE, NEaT and the CSE (Australia) and a regular presenter at international conferences.

About PEG

The Professional Editors’ Guild (PEG) is a non-profit company (NPC) in South Africa. Since moving to online activities in March 2020, PEG has been able to offer members across South Africa, and internationally, access to an extensive online webinar programme. Continuing professional development remains a key offering and the first PEG Accreditation Test was administered in August 2020 to benchmark excellence in the field of editing.