What is Style?

One of my first blog entries was titled "What is Style?" It offered my definition of style at the beginning of English 328. Here was my original definition.

Style is the organization of thoughts onto a medium. The medium could be physical such as a piece of paper, canvas, or piece of clay. It could also be abstract like a website or a piece of music. Often the organization could use colors, sounds, or shape to express meaning. The placement of words, white space, and other elements could also be used.

I think I had a good start on a definition of style. Strunk and White's Elements of Style enlightened me with rules to improve the style of my writing. Many of these rules focused on punctuation, the choice of words, the use of common words and phrases, and the quality of writing. Simplifying sentences by removing unnecessary words was a suggestion in the book. Similarly, Style by Williams built upon some of the ideas in Strunk and White while adding writing layout strategies. Cohesion was explained over two chapters. Examples of sexist writing were given. The history of writing was used to explain the roots of many commonly held ideas of writing. These two books demonstrated that my definition was lacking choices about word usage, clarity, cohesion, punctuation, and even the idea that is OK to break the rules as Williams suggests near the end of Style.

The writing technology assignment forced me to think about writing utensils and the surface that I wrote on. My original definition outlines surfaces very well, but my essay focused on the raspberries which were the utensil. Putting the two together in the definition would serve well. Tools influence the way in which we write. The style is affected as well. There is a relationship between the technology of writing, the style and the content. I can express much more information on a computer word processing program than a rock in a garden with dandelions. It is also easier to read the word document and I can change the form to a printed document or submit it to a publisher to be turned in a book.

In another post, "The Elements of Style", I wrote

Upon reading elements of style, I realize the change in language over time. Many phrases and words in the book are part of everyday speech. In the chapter entitled "Misused words and expressions", White writes about the use of "care less". (42) Often, "I could care less," is used in everyday speech. I have read in the past that the proper phrase is "I couldn't care less."

This post suggests that writing (and style) evolve over time. Common misuse of the phrase has changed the interpretation of the phrase to mean something that the words do not suggest. Following style guidelines can help with interpretation. A person learning English who must think about the meaning of each word would be confused by the misuse of this phrase. Good style is about articulating your point in a way best served by the intended audience.

I wrote about web comics. Artists and writers working on comics often push the envelope when creating their art form. They use unique styles, and sometimes draw on old artistic techniques to express words and ideas. They use the visual imagery to express meaning in addition to text. My original definition includes use of different mediums, but I could add more about the use of imagery in relation to expressing thoughts.

The Internet has changed the ideas of style, as have the efforts of Apple and Microsoft to bring desktop computers into our lives. My widescreen monitor displays web pages and word documents differently offering horizontal space. Another person designing a webpage will not see what I see. The appearance is different and I may react to it in another way. Style is influenced by the author's individual characteristics, and by the physical and virtual representation. The reader or users view of the information is also influenced by this presentation as well as their own baggage.

Blogging offers a relaxed atmosphere where I can write prose without as much thought to form. Function is more important. I can change the appearance of many elements, but not all.

Style reflects the presentation of content.

"The Most Important" Web Style Rule

The most important web style rule is found on the "Spiderpro: Styleguide: compatibility" website. It is "Do validate" (Kampherbeek). The Spiderpro site adds "Validate your pages. This is the best way to find errors that won't show up in some browsers but might be the cause of trouble in other browsers" (Kampherbeek). Validation is imporant because any other style rule is irrelevant if someone can not see your website. Standards compliance supports all types of devices from cell phones and Nintendo Wiis to personal computers and PDAs. Not everyone will use Internet Explorer to see your website. The W3C offers a free validation service at http://validator.w3.org/ . You can also validate RSS and ATOM feeds often found on blogs and news sites. There is also a link to the W3C CSS validator. The "Web Style Guide" by Lynch and Horton says "If reasonable, consistent design standards are not adopted, the average user suffers confusion, reduced productivity, and lost opportunity to benefit from the promise of Web information sources." (Lynch and Horton) The design of a website can not be consistent if the markup is not standards compliant. By validating pages, authors can be certain there is consistent markup. A visual verification of design consistency will make users happy. A viewable website will let you get your message out.

Most devices support HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional. XHTML 1.0 Basic was developed for embedded devices and cell phones. A subset of XHTML 1.0 Strict is the basis for this alternate standard.

To learn more about web standards, consult the W3C website at http://www.w3.org/. The "Spiderpro" site is located at http://www.spiderpro.com/pr/prstgm001_cmp.html and the "Web Style Guide" at http://www.webstyleguide.com/site/standards.html .

Connecting paper style with web style

Styling web pages and conventional printed documents have many similarities. One must create a legible document. Using busy backgrounds on a website is similar to using unusual paper with stripes or using a color of paper that is similar to the color of printed text. Text is hard to read in either case, and should be avoided at all costs. Second, text must be easy to read. The choice of font size can create an easy to read document or one that is difficult to read. Small print is very difficult to read on any surface. Large print is distracting. The amount of time required to read a document increases significantly, although it is easier to correct on a computer. One may need to use a magnifying glass with a piece of paper.

There are also differences with the choice of medium. Using a web page offers an advantage. An author can include video or audio content in a presentation and offer interactivity to the user. These elements engage the user, thereby giving a rich, interactive experience. With paper documents, one is limited to text often black with a white or off=white paper. Pictures can be included in documents, but the quality of the image is limited to the paper and printer used. Web pages also allow authors to use color in their presentation. High printing costs limit the use of color in printed documents. Color helps an author show emphasis on sections of material which might be difficult with a paper document where bold and italic styles are available.

One consideration with web documents is that they are not overdone. The limits imposed on printed material also offer guidance in styling them to conventions. With the web, authors frequently embellish content beyond the need to emphasize it. It is quite easy for a web author to go too far.

McCloud #2: Nowhere Girl

I read a blog entry about a comic called "Nowhere Girl." The comic outlines the life of a someone unusual girl who does not fit in with her friends and has suicidal tendancies. "Nowhere Girl" makes use of sharp images with adult themed back story dealing with suicide, acceptance and other topics. While I agree with Michal that the comic is a bit boring and whiny, it also talks about issues many unpopular people go through. Constant teasing, weird looks, and social awkardness is very common with geeks. Some people even label those different than them as a threat. Columbine and the VT shootings were blamed on video games and many other items. Ignoring sad people can be dangerous, but one little issue isn't it.

Scott McCloud wrote a book entitled Understanding Comics. In the book, McCloud outlines many techniques to create comics. While the book does not outline drawing comics, it does provide style guidelines to create the story, use imagery, and relate time and space to individual cells. Michal points out that "Nowhere Girl" is a word specific comic. The story can be told without the visual art, but I also feel the art adds mood to the work. The girl in the comic is very sad and drawn with black clothing. She is void of color when the world is often drawn with lots of color with right angles. She walks into an art show which is very vivid and the shapes are crisp. McCloud has an illustration of a man smoking a pipe with two wavy lines and states, "Despite their superficial resemblance, these are two very different sets of lines. One represents a visible phenomenon, smoke, while the other represents an invisible one, our sense of smell." (McClound 128) In "Nowhere Girl", I believe the meaning of right angles in most of the environments represents order. The girl is often drawn a little bit irregular showing her emotion. In the scenes with rain, the rain is often drawn at an angle and cloudy showing her feelings. The dialog in those sequences tends to relate her feelings with others feeling uncomfortable. The use of lines reinfornce the character's feelings without adding any additional information that is needed. The comic is much more powerful than a short story in plain text would have been. I don't think readers are supposed to like the story, but they should appreciate the artistic merit of the artist. The quality is similar to a modern "Amazing Spider-man" comic.

Web Comic: PVP

While reading Scott McCloud's website, I stumbled across a web comic called Player Vs. Player (PVP). The comic is about a fictional game magazine publishing company. The strip takes place in the office, similar to other online strips such as User Friendly. According to the wikipedia entry, the comic was started in 1998 and has been published in Image Comics. The creator, Kurtz, has changed the format of the comic several times, eventually going to "widescreen" format. Monday thru Thursday, the comic strip is done in black and white with full color on Fridays.

There are several reoccuring characters including Cole Richards (Editor in Chief), Brent Sienna (Creative Director and Mac Zealot), Jade Fontaine, Francis Ottoman (younger gamer), Skull the Troll, and 11 other characters.

Today's comic features a drawer full of cloth maps from old games. The Editor-in-Chief has been collecting them for ages. The deluxe edition of World of Warcraft included a cloth map of the world with great detail of the two continents. I pictures that map while reading this comic. The subject matter tends to be geeky things, and occasionally some relationship issues between the characters. This comic makes use of words and pictures. The style is typical of "traditional" print comics one might see in the newspaper. Scott McCloud writes in "Understanding Comics", "A Great majority of modern comics do feature words and pictures in combination and its's a subject worthy of study, but when used as a definition for comics, I've found it to be a little too restrictive for my taste". (McCloud 21) In this case, that restrictive definition would work. The delivery of comics over the Internet might be considered unorthidox by some and possibly not comics. Its clear the concept of a comic can be extended to the web metaphor just as easy as print media.

The comic can be found at http://www.pvponline.com/. The wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PvP and finally McCloud's website is at http://www.scottmccloud.com/links/links.html

What do others think?

After reviewing different blogs, I noticed Michal's comments on Williams and Strunk and White. Michal writes, "About design, Strunk and White emphasize virtually every type of writing must adhere to a shape and that shape must be designed and then followed. What Strunk and White call design, Williams calls coherence. Coherence is distributing topics in a paragraph or longer writing in a way that makes sense to the reader. Williams says “we always have to choose our topics, to design topic strings that focus the reader’s attention on a particular point of view” (82)." I feel this is an excellent summary of coherence. Michal simplified the text on coherence in both books into a neat package. Reading the entry changed my perspective and clarified some lingering doubts about the books. I feel that I misinterpreted sections of the books.

Michal also writes, "One of the more readable chapters in Strunk and White about style and the difficulty of developing style since it is not something that can be explicitly taught." I agree that style is learned through practice and observance. It is not a series of steps, which I iterated in my previous blog entry.

I focused on "good" English elements found in chapter ten of the Williams book. Michal refers to it as well. "He acknowledges that “good” English is often arbitrary and explains how it came to be that way. He does outline the grammar rules that must not be broken in writing, but writes about words only that can easily be misused, not about words that personally irritate him." This is the most useful portion of the Williams book. Analyzing the source of rules given to us through our academic career gives us a better perspective on our writing and what sources to trust.

Comparing Strunk and White with Williams

Style Toward Clarity and Grace focuses on a different aspect of writing than The Elements of Style. The former introduces common sense style guidelines. Struck and White's The Elements of Style covers use cases of the English language. The discussion of style in Struck and White is too concise. It lacks examples of modern writing, and common errors. I previously wrote "Elements of Style includes some useful material. Chapter one covers basic usage of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and other elements. As I have not reviewed basic grammar rules for well over ten years, it was beneficial to review the material." The Williams book does not cover usage of punctuation, but it includes preferred uses of words and phrases as well as recommendations for sentence, paragraph and document structure.

Williams offers excellent advice. Sentence and paragraph structure is covered in great detail. The chapters "Cohesion", "Coherence I" and "Coherence II" diagram sentence structure and the relationship of sentences within paragraphs. Williams offers historical explanations for writing style rules from other texts. My favorite explanation deals with proper rules for "good English" in chapter ten.

3. Finally, some grammarians try to impose on those who already write educated standard English particular items of usage that they think those educated writers should observe--don't split infinitives; use that, not which for restrictive clauses; use fewer, not less for countable nouns; don't use hopefully to mean I hope. These are matters that few speakers and writers of nonstandard English worry about. They are, however, items about which educated writers disagree.

Williams 176

In this section, Williams has a commentary on writers who impose their rules of writing on others. Struck created the text to teach freshmen his rules. Williams essentially argued against Struck's approach. Williams greatest contribution is the idea that the absence of style is recognized; good writing is not detectable because of the application of rules.

Struck and White offer a reference to aid writers in selecting the best words and punctuation. The book uses concise sentences, brief examples, and whitespace to ease readers in finding information much like a dictionary or encyclopedia. It is very useful if one is familiar with English grammar. The book suggests areas to improve in style. "1. Place yourself in the background" (Struck and White 70) Suggestions often take the form of rules with numerals assigned to each. Grammar can be learned by applying rules, but style is an abstract concept; rules do little to help grasp such ideas. Style is not a finite space that can be determined like the proof of a math problem or the source code to a computer program.

COSC Curriculum: Revising with Williams

Original Version
Students completing the curriculum are uniquely equipped to pursue
advanced graduate degrees. Both the applied computer science major and
the computer science curriculum offer a mix of practice and theory that
prepare students for graduate study and for career employment in computer
science fields such as systems programming and analysis, software
development and maintenance as well as applications programming. Strong
industrial ties and an active cooperative education program provide both
practical learning experience and entry into cutting edge job markets such
as network administration, database design and administration and data
hosting and related services. Part-time on-campus employment opportunities
also encourage hands-on learning.

New Version
The applied computer science major and computer science curriculum offer a mix of practice and theory that prepare students for graduate study and for career employment. Students will be able to seek employment in fields such as systems programming and analysis, software development and maintenance, as well as application development. Strong industrial ties and an active cooperative education program provide both practical learning experience and entry into cutting edge job markets such as network administration, database design and administration and data hosting and related services. Part-time on-campus employment opportunities encourage hands-on learning.

Summary of Changes
The first sentence of the original version was redundant. Students interested in the computer science programs may not wish to explore graduate programs. Mentioning graduate programs without any description of the program was rather odd. Williams discusses clarity in chapter 2 of his book Style Toward Clarity and Grace. Sentences were reordered to improve the relationship of subjects with the rest of the sentence. Sentences were simplified to improve legibility. The first sentence uses a psychological subject to focus on the computer science curriculum. Sentences were simplified, and emphasis was added to maintain focus on critical topics. In the old version, a complex introduction was used; it did not seem to flow or connect to the second sentence.

The Elements of Style

Upon reading elements of style, I realize the change in language over time. Many phrases and words in the book are part of everyday speech. In the chapter entitled "Misused words and expressions", White writes about the use of "care less". (42) Often, "I could care less," is used in everyday speech. I have read in the past that the proper phrase is "I couldn't care less." This was a useful example for many writers. Other examples are useless such as "Anticipate. Use expect in the sense of simple expectation." (40) Anticipate and expect are similar words. When I think about anticipate, I assume there is an action associated with the use of the word. White uses an example, "My brother anticipated the upturn in the market." He continues with "In the second example, the word anticipated is ambiguous. It could mean simply that the brother believed the upturn would occur, or it could mean that he acted in advance of the expected upturn -- by buying stock, perhaps." I believe the use of anticipated suggests the brother took advantage of the market conditions and completed stock trades. If not, expected would be the correct choice. Ambiguity does not seem to apply. This is merely one example of selective interpretation in the book.

In chapter five, White writes about style. Rule 6, "Do not overwrite," discusses the disregard for brevity. "When writing with a computer, you must guard against wordiness. The click and flow of a word processor can be seductive, and you may find yourself adding a few unnecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keyboard..." The author should consider his own advice. This is a very long sentence about the mysterious powers of a computer. Last I checked, computers do not have mind control software.


Elements of Style includes some useful material. Chapter one covers basic usage of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and other elements. As I have not reviewed basic grammar rules for well over ten years, it was beneficial to review the material. "Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation." (7) This rule, for instance, documents the proper use of a colon. It would be helpful to include working definitions of words like appositive. Using the examples allows the reader to grasp meaning, but when descriptive words are used, and not understood, they confuse the reader. One can forget a great number of definitions and rules when they are rarely used over many years.

My project uses raspberries to create letters. They stand out on many surfaces, are fairly easy to read, and the juices can soak in and stain the orignal surface area. Raspberries are fairly portable, although the message is stuck in one place once its written. I found this project to be very difficult. Finding something natural for a process which itself is unnatural was challenging. Manguel's "The Shape of the Book" talks about presentation with writing. Using raspberries allowed me to create a very color message "Today is my birthday". "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies" discusses the evolution of writing tools and the necessity of changes. Using raspberries fit into my needs, but would not work as a general purpose tool like a pen and paper or a computer. With computers, we may not leave a permenent record of events. Perhaps a PC will be dug up in a thousand years and no one will be able to retrive the contents of the disk. Just as my raspberries will deteriorate, so will the remains of our current world.

I prefer to write on a computer. I take course notes on one of my laptops. The legibility of my notes are very important and my handwriting is not the best. I also find that I can control the presentation and size of the content freely on a computer. I can control how it is printed, how it is displayed on the screen and what form I transmit to interested parties. Manguel and Baron's ideas work together on a computer to make the best possible experience.

The common relationship between the history of writing and the ideas of Ong and Plato are in the evolution of the tools to allow humans to express their thoughts in new ways and the necessity of change in cultural evolution.

What is style?

Style is the organization of thoughts onto a medium. The medium could be physical such as a piece of paper, canvas, or piece of clay. It could also be abstract like a website or a piece of music. Often the organization could use colors, sounds, or shape to express meaning. The placement of words, white space, and other elements could also be used.

First Post

My name is Lucas Holt. This is my blog for English 328.

Here is a picture of the first Web Browser called World Wide Web running on my NeXT system.