Style: A Pragmatic Approach

Style combines a concise and clear guide to stylistic revision and a mini-anthology of professional prose stylists.

Its approach is non-technical and commonsensical, grounding stylistic instruction in what students already know: namely, how to conduct a conversation. Instead of a list of "rules" of style, Style offers three stylistic guidelines - relevance, proportion, and clarity - derived from everyday conversation and based on the fields of pragmatics and speech act theory. Plentiful examples, exercise sets, a glossary of grammatical and linguistic terms, and the mini-anthology support the instruction.