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

Authorial and Text Style

Task A - Initial impressions: Steinbeck passage

For us, this writing style seems very simple, external and objective. It is about as near as you could get to a neutral description of a photograph of a person. Of course it is impossible to get completely neutral descriptions of people, and to choose to portray someone in a neutral way is itself a style choice compared with describing the same person in other ways. But all that said, and in spite of the fact that photographs can also be taken in different, and biased ways, the reading impression here appears to be of simple, external, relatively neutral, photograph-like description of a person. Below are our rough estimates of where the writing would come on the various scales we indicated (our scores for the passage are highlighted and indicated in bold):

You may not get exactly the same scores as us (you may not have understood the scales in exactly the same way as us), but we think you will also have pretty low figures on the scales indicated. It would be possible to be even more prosaic (by removing the 'cut' metaphor in sentence 2 and the simile in sentence 4), but even very prosaic descriptions are not entirely bereft of 'poetic' features, and so we scored 1 for Prosaic - Poetic. Similar things could be said about the other scales we scored 1 for (for example, the information about the man keeping his mouth closed is a small piece of information which could not be seen externally). But we are just after initial impressions for comparative purposes here. The reason we decided to score the passage with a 2 for Simple - Complex is because, although the passage is very simple, it could have been made even simpler by, for example, removing the coordination between the two main clauses in sentence 1 and producing two simple sentences ('His eyes were very dark brown. There was a hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs.) A similar operation could have been undertaken for sentence 2, and sentence 3 could have been rewritten as 'His lower lip was long. His teeth protruded and the lips stretched over the teeth. This man kept his lips closed.' This operation would have removed some of the coordination and also the small amount of grammatical complexity in the sentence (we will cover grammatical complexity in Topic 7)

Because the external description of the man is so simple and straightforward, we tend to view him as simple and straightforward too, which turns out to be appropriate as the Tom Joad is a working class Okie migrant to California, an honest man, mistreated by others.

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