1. PROSE STYLES: TOUGH, SWEET AND STUFFY
by Don L. F. Nilsen 21

2. THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK: ETHOS PATHOS LOGOS
POINT OF VIEW:
THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
ETHOS PATHOS LOGOS
TOUGH SWEET STUFFY
1ST PERSON 2ND PERSON 3RD PERSON
SUBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE
INFORMAL INTIMATE FORMAL 21

3. TOUGH LANGUAGE
Tough language is the rhetoric of Frederic Henry in Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the pain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.” 21

4. It is the language of intimacy, the language of no pretentions
It is the language of intimacy, the language of no pretentions. The words are simple and the grammar is simple.
The writing is not planned, but just happens, in a stream of consciousness kind of way—you are there.
The sentences are short and choppy. If there is conjunction it is coordination, not subordination.
It is the language of the loosened tie and the rolled up shirt sleeves, with no pretentious multi-syllable or low-frequency words. 21

5. Being egocentric, it is subjective, and whether it is written from the author participant or the author omniscient point of view, it is concerned with communicating people’s innermost feelings.
Tough language is the language of fiction, and therefore the process of “in medias res” is totally appropriate to this style—”In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountain. 21

6. SWEET LANGUAGE
Sweet language is the language of advertisors. Walker Gibson calls this language AROMA (Advertising Rhetoric of Madison Avenue).
Sweet language is listener-oriented in an attempt to seduce listeners into buying products they don’t want or need. 21

7. It is language full of innovative spellings, creative grammar, and wild punctuation.
Sweet writing contains many sentence fragments, and would rather flaunt a grammatical rule than conform to it: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. What do you want, good grammar, or good taste?” 21

8. It is informal, or sometimes even intimate or cutesy in tone.
Sweet language is the language of sensationalism, the language of superlatives and hyperbole.
It is the language of diversion; it plays tricks on the reader with its puns, its word coinages, its humor, its packaging, its sex, and other aspects which have nothing to do with the product itself.
It is informal, or sometimes even intimate or cutesy in tone. 21

9. Contractions, clippings, blendings, and deletions abound, making it all the more cryptic and intimate.
It’s full of slang expressions like “no doubt about it,” “cut it out,” and “where else?” It can be cutesy, as in “Dry skin? Not me, darling. Every inch of little me is as smooth as (well, you know what).” 21

10. Gibson says that a common kind of coinage in sweet language is the noun-adjunct construction (a noun modified by another noun).
We see this kind of coinage in “Speakerphone,” “Fooderama living,” “decorator colors,” and “Supermarket selection.”
The Bell Company praises the beauties of its “hands-free, group-talk, across-the-room telephone. 21

11. STUFFY LANGUAGE
Where tough language is I-oriented, and sweet language is you-oriented, stuffy language is it-oriented.
It is the language of laboratory experiments , of research papers and theses and dissertations and scholarly books, and academia in general. 21

12. Stuffy language is highly grammatical and highly formal.
The syntax contains a great deal of subordination, and the sentences are frequently long and complex.
Infinitives, gerunds, present and past participial constructions, nominative absolutes, perfect, progressive, and passive constructions are almost totally confined to this style of writing. 21

13. It is an impersonal style to the extent that first-person pronouns are seldom allowed. For this and other reasons, passive constructions and impersonal constructions with abstract subjects are common.
Stuffy language is also the language of limitations, restrictions and qualifications because the writer doesn’t want to make claims beyond the evidence.
Limiting (as opposed to descriptive) adjectives are frequent, as are prepositional phrases and relative clauses. 21

14. THE BIRMINGHAM RIOTS: REPORTED IN THREE DIFFERENT STYLES
“The police and firemen drove hundreds of rioting Negroes off the streets today with high pressure hoses and an armored car.”
New York Times May 8, 1963 21

15. New York Herald Tribune
“Three times during the day, waves of shouting, rock-throwing Negroes had poured into the downtown business district, to be scattered and driven back by battering streams of water from high-pressure hoses and swinging clubs of policemen and highway patrolmen.”
New York Herald Tribune 21

16. “The blaze of bombs, the flash of blades, the eerie glow of fire, the keening cries of hatred, the wild dance of terror at night—all this was Birmingham, Alabama.”
Time, May 7, 1963 21

17. SUMMARY OF WORD DEVELOPMENT: THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
COLLOQUIAL COLLOQUIAL FORMAL
SLANG: CHARACTER SLANG: AD NO SLANG
DEPENDENT DEPENDENT
MODALS
GERUNDS
INFINITIVES
PERFECTS
PROGRESSIVES
SPELLING = SPELLINGS = SPELLINGS =
CHARACTERS CREATIVE CORRECT
ANGLO-SAXON ANGLO-SAXON INKHORN TERMS
WORDS WORDS GREEK & LATIN 21

18. SUMMARY OF SENTENCE DEVELOPMENT: THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
SHORT, CHOPPY LONG, COMPLICATED
FRAGMENTS PERFECT GRAMMAR
COMMA SPLICES
SIMPLE SIMPLE LONG & COMPLEX
RESTRICTIVE MODIFIER
SIMPLE SENTENCES COMPOUND &
COMPLEX SENTENCES
CASUAL PUNCTUATION PERFECT PUNCTUATION
RHETORICAL SENTENCES DON’T
QUESTIONS MAKE CLAIMS BEYOND
IMPERATIVES EVIDENCE
THEY,YOU, 21

19. !SUMMARY OF PARAGRAPH AND DISCOURSE DEVELOPMENT!
THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
STREAM OF CASUAL STRUCTURED
CONSCIOUSNESS
INDUCTIVE WHATEVER DEDUCTIVE
NOTE: THE NEWSPAPER IS SUPER DEDUCTIVE BECAUSE PEOPLE READ HEADLINES; AND MAYBE FIRST PARAGRAPH (WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHY, WHERE, HOW); AND LATER MATERIALS GET BURIED OR CUT
MUCH INUENDO INTIMATE & CUTESY CAUSAL
AND IMPLICATION 21

20. !!SUMMARY OF USE OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
AUTHOR PARTICIPANT ? AUTHOR
AUTHOR OBSERVANT OBSERVANT
AUTHOR OMNISCIENT
MAINLY TROPES: MAINLY SCHEMES: LITERAL
IN MEDIAS RES ALLITERATION
METAPHOR ASSONANCE
IRONY RHYME
POETIC JUSTICE CUTESY TONE
SIMILES
ALLEGORIES 21

21. !!!SUMMARY OF PUNCTUATION THE NOVEL: THE AD: THE TEXT BOOK:
CREATIVE CREATIVE FORMAL USE OF:
PUNCTUATION PUNCTUATION SEMI COLONS
PERIODS
PARENTHESES
DASHES HYPHENS RESTRICTIVE AND NON-RESTRICTIVE CLAUSES
PROPER CAPITALIZATION
USE OF ELIPSES …
[SIC]
BRACKETS, ETC. 21

22. References:
Barry, Anita K. English Grammar: Language as Human Behavior, 2nd Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2002.
Gibson, Walker. Tough, Sweet and Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1966. 21