Style Metrics
It wasn’t until I got further down the library stacks, and catacombs of scholastic studies plus popular culture material about Shakespeare that I figured out some of my own prose style.
Digging through my archives, I was looking for a specific Shakespeare quote I’m sure I’ve used as a weekly introduction, and I happened across some of my material that is decades old. I noticed two textual mistakes, not typos, but structural repetitions that are unnecessary. This is material that is old, presumably out-of-date, so I leave the mistakes where they are.
The recent spate of scholastic, scholarly, computer-aided analysis of Shakespeare texts, which have broadened the accepted canon, brought up fascinating points about my own work.
Style Metrics
The term I heard, read, but also heard in some circles? Stylemetry or stylometrics, as a quantifiable elements of a particular author’s style. Gratefully, I’ve long-held my own style, rampant with its run-ons, dangling modifiers, and other assorted grammatical oddities. Errors?
I tend towards “spit and post,” because, it is a weekly column. It does get more than one set of eyeballs to spot deficiencies, but that doesn’t always work.
It was Shakespeare and stylometrics that got me looking at the substance of the style.
Style Metrics
Think I’ve got style covered. However, an early observation, my personal “style” tends to reflect whatever I’m reading at the time. Lots of newspaper-type of journalism? I err towards concise fact delivery with as little liberal spin as possible. I do veer left, but just a little. I got one toe over the line, dear sweet Jesus, one toe over the line.
A couple of my favorite authors tend towards long sentences. Long, meandering, nuanced, metaphorical, prose that conveys inflection and reflection, rather than stating the obvious, with a definite destination, but the route itself shaded by pieces that create an annoyingly long sentence structure, obfuscated by vocabulary and tangential expressions of extant energies.
All depends.
Still, if subjected to a computer-based analysis, which, since everything is online, I’m sure this has happened, my own style, despite other attempts, would be obvious.
All started with listening to Shakespeare, read aloud.
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