Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Authorial and text style > Task A

Authorial and Text Style

Task A - Initial impressions

1. Read each of the texts below a few times, until you feel that you understand them well. As you do so, begin to compare the passages with one another - it is easiest to 'see' the characteristics of a text if you compare it with other, roughly equivalent texts.
   
   
2. Write down the initial impressions you have about the style in which each passage is written, compared with the other two. Can you think up intuitive descriptive labels which characterize the styles of the three texts?
   
   
3. For comparative purposes and using the scales below, rate each passage in turn, by choosing what you think is the most representative number on the scale. At the same time, write down your initial impressions about the image of the person/people being presented to you.
   
   

   Prosaic	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Poetic
   Objective	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Biased
   External	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Internal
   Simple	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Complex
   Straightforward	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Rhetorical

   
   
4. Compare your findings with our characterisations by clicking on the buttons after the three passages.

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)

View our analysis of:

Steinbeck Passage   Jane Austen Passage   Lawrence Passage

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