The text below comes from my Senior Seminar with Dr. Elizabeth Burmester. The assignment called for a stylistic analysis of a professional text, and we were allowed to choose any text we wished. I chose a memoir from The Paris Review, The Tender Night by Paula Fox, since I read the publication often and was struck by that particular piece. The assignment required a lot of time analyzing the author’s stylistic habits, choices, and tendencies. I spent many hours breaking up sentences, identifying parts of speech, and looking for patterns. Through this analysis, I discovered many ways to personally improve my style in the ways I saw Ms. Fox’s style working.

Stylistic Analysis of a Professional Text: The Tender Night, Paula Fox

A stylistic analysis of a text opens the reader’s eyes to both effective and ineffective methods in which a writer communicates to an audience. These factors include sentence variety and structure, use of transition words, point of view, and punctuation. While analyzing Paula Fox’s The Tender a Night, a memoir written for The Paris Review, I spent time examining the elements of her text listed above in hopes to improve my writing and examine a professional piece for writing quality.

My sample, which did not include the entire piece, was a total of 1,405 words and contained 75 sentences and 22 paragraphs. The first thing I noticed about Ms. Fox’s work was that the length of her sentences varied widely throughout the piece: the longest sentence was 65 words (“Years earlier, I had overheard my mother speak scornfully about opera to one of my uncles—‘all those fat people standing around bellowing at each other,’ she had said, and although I never consciously paid any attention to my mother’s aesthetic opinions—they couldn’t penetrate the obscuring darkness between us—somehow her words had been able to leave a stain for me in operatic music.”), and the shortest was only 3 (“She laughed outright”). Despite this stark difference, the average sentence length was 18.7 words, and about half were over the average length (34) while only slightly more were under the average length (41). I noticed while reading the memoir that Ms. Fox tended to use shorter sentences when attempting to emphasize an event occurring between characters or to move along the scene at a quicker pace. I found Ms. Fox’s use of many different sentence lengths an effective way to keep the reader engaged in the story and to provide variety within the paragraphs.

She also has a wide variety of sentence types, but she uses mostly simple sentences adorned with descriptions and additions that make the sentence more full, such as prepositional phrases or the use of “and” to add information (“I shook it, aware of its warmth and firmness” and “Now he was trying the tenants on my floor”).

Her sentence contain elements of parallelism, and typically is broken into three different parts, especially when she is listing something. One example of this is when she describes the main character’s roommate, Dwayne: “Dwayne would often return home to 6E from rehearsals, smoke a little marijuana, and lie down on the living-room floor to sleep for an hour or two.” Dwayne’s routine when he came home from work is described as a triad of activities. Another instance of this is when the narrator is speaking to the main character’s mother: “I spoke of the pleasures of the park on the other side of the broad avenue, asked her pointless questions about the town she came from, and mentioned neighborhood crime, attributing it to poverty and hopelessness.” The narrator asks these questions in a set of three.

Ms. Fox uses transition words sparingly, and tends to use mostly time-related words to identify when conversations and events occur within her memoir, such as “now,” “once,” “when,” and “while.” In my sample, each of these words is used only once, except for “when,” which is used twice. Ms. Fox’s most common transition word is “although,” which is often used to provide contrast and to show the personality of a character in greater detail. A sentence in the third paragraph describing the main character of the memoir illustrates this (“He loved the title, Tender is the Night, although he had never heard of the writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald”).

Since The Tender Night is a memoir, it is written entirely in first person except for when a character speaks to the narrator using “you.” In this sample, 47 sentences use the first-person point of view. the word “I” is used 50 times, while “we” or “our” is used nine times. Out of the 75 total sentences, only 33 do not contain the words “I” or “you.” I found this technique to draw the reader into the story in a way that greatly sympathizes with the narrator. When Ms. Fox uses dialogue that contains the word “you,” I felt like the character was speaking directly to me rather than the narrator. Though the story is told in first person, the narrator often uses pronouns such as “she” and “he” to describe the people with whom she interacts.

I found that Ms. Fox introduces sentences most often with one of these first-, second-, or third-person pronouns—“I,” “he,” our,” “we,” and “she”—moving the story and transitioning with the action of the characters in her story. When she wants to move on from a scene and transition into another, she often uses a simple transition word or phrase like “later,” “years earlier,” or “one late afternoon” to clearly mark the ending of the previous scene and the beginning of a new one.

Another way Ms. Fox moves the story forward is through the use of punctuation. She uses commas quite often—especially when describing a character or when painting a picture for the reader. For example, when describing the narrator’s children’s bedroom, she uses a sentence filled with extra clauses and descriptors that contains four commas: “Except the boys’ bedroom, full of books and games, their discarded clothes all over the floor, the rest of the my rooms looked bare, even meager.”

She never uses exclamation points or question marks, even in her dialogue. Instead of expressing excitement or interrogation through punctuation, Ms. Fox describes the feelings and reactions of the characters through her narrator. The last sentence in the sample displays this well, as Ms. Fox could have added an exclamation to the sentence to reinforce the emotion of the speaker: “She laughed outright. ‘You see, they agree with me,’ she said.” Instead of adding an exclamation to the speaker’s statement, Ms. Fox described the feeling in the speaker’s actions: “She laughed outright.”

I would describe Ms. Fox’s style as tough, plain, and middle styles. Since she is often brief in her descriptions and does not use passive voice, her writing is tough. Since her language is colloquial and lacks ornateness, it is of the middle style. I would also describe her style as plain, since her language is current and familiar and she does not use words that are difficult to understand. The sample contains none of Longinus’ writing flaws; her language is consistent throughout the sample and contains no trace of hollowness, immaturity, excessiveness, or over-sentimentality. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for this text is 7.8, which reinforces the claim that her writing is easy to read and uses colloquial, familiar language. The following sentence is a good example of Ms. Fox’s colloquial yet well constructed language:

“Years earlier I had overheard my mother speak scornfully about opera to one of my uncles—‘all those fat people standing around bellowing at each other,’ she had said, and although I never consciously paid any attention to my mother’s aesthetic opinions—they couldn’t penetrate the obscuring darkness between us—somehow her words had been able to leave a stain for me on operatic music.”

Ms. Fox’s language is void of lofty or overly sophisticated words is her, yet does not contain immature language or demean the audience by using lower language. Her descriptions are full and effective without being over the top.

What I drew most from Ms. Fox’s writing style is her keen ability to describe people and occurrences using a variety of sentences—changing both in length and type. She almost never uses the same sentence structure twice, but maintains a parallelism that is essential to keeping structure within a sentence.

When describing a scene, she chooses words that are essential and never uses too many words. As a rhetoric student, professors often tell me to choose the right word rather than use too many words and clutter the sentence. Ms. Fox demonstrates this well.

I greatly admire Ms. Fox’s ability to use commas in a manner that moves the piece forward but avoids overusing them. She uses punctuation to effectively place descriptions and additions in a sentence as well as construct sentences well.

Examining The Tender Night for style helped me more effectively identify how the elements of writing work together to create a piece that effectively communicates to the reader. With a firm knowledge of the needs of the targeted audience and a language that reflects that need, a writer can incorporate his/her personal style to create an effective piece of writing.

Reflection

When analyzing The Tender Night, I learned a lot about the structure of a work as a whole and how many elements of writing work together to create a well written and effective piece of writing. Even the littlest element, such as use of punctuation, affects the text’s meaning and flow.

I think I learned the most from examining the writing patterns in the text’s writing, such as the consistent parallelism in Ms. Fox’s writing. This examination caused me to consider the patterns in my own writing within my sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes these patterns are good foundations to a style, while it sometimes needs to be broken up to give variety to a text rather than a pattern that turns into a formula. This also applies to sentence length; I found Ms. Fox’s use of different sentence lengths to move her piece along. I aspire to create variety in my own writing in a way that Ms. Fox does in The Tender Night.

Though writers have an established style they call their own, it changes based upon audience and should always be examined to determine whether an element should be added or taken away. Writers should be aware of their writing habits and be willing to explore new ways to add variety and flavor to their style.

Through this analysis, I have found myself to greatly value solid sentence structure and patterns while still creating variety within the style with punctuation and sentence length. I hope to replicate this concept in my own writing by striving for more punctuation variety and daring to divert from my normal structure in order to add something new to my style.