Shifting Styles
Shifting Styles
WHAT IS STYLE SHIFTING?
As a student of composition, you might feel like you are learning a lot about reading and writing. And hopefully you are. But it is important to keep in mind that you came to this class knowing a lot about language. Think of all the contexts you use language in effectively — at home, at school, on the field, at work, in the classroom. The settings you move between can be quite different and demand that you use English in ways that vary greatly. And you probably do this with ease. When you are chatting with coworkers and a regional manager walks in, you shift what you are saying and how you say it. Most of the time, you probably aren't even aware of what you are doing, but you are shifting your style to fit a given setting, context, and audience.
We all do this often unconscious shifting in our speech to meet what we believe to be the expectations of our audience, but we also do this in our writing. Think about the various styles of writing that you do each day — text messages, Facebook posts, Moodle discussion board responses, academic papers and even to-do lists are just some of the different styles of writing that you are engaged in on a daily basis. Most likely you do not think about the ways in which you change your writing or speech or the reasons why you change your style for each of these situations; you just do it.
WHY DO WE SHIFT STYLES?
This ability to style shift is part of your linguistic competence, a language capacity that you have that contains not just grammatical concepts such as parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives, or the fact that English sentences typically come in Subject, Verb, Object order, but it also contains detailed information about the ways in which you should speak or write for a given situation. Your linguistic competence lets you know that you can say or write things like ain't in facebook posts, text messages, and in other informal and casual situations, but that often ain't would not be appropriate in a research essay. All of these different ways of speaking and writing make up your linguistic style and give you a linguistic repertoire — your toolbox for doing language in your life in any situation. This powerful toolbox that we all have and that we all get to add to throughout our life works as social capital.
In the following sections we will talk about the ways that your linguistic competence manifests in different linguistic styles and the ways in which we adapt styles and reactions to different styles.
WE ALL SPEAK A DIALECT AND HAVE LINGUISTIC STYLE(S)
Each one of us (regardless of our language) speaks a dialect (regional, ethnic, social, age, or combination of these) and we all have a number of linguistic styles available to us. Just as our dialect indicates something about our identity, our styles that we choose to use in different situations also reveal to our listener or reader information about our identity. Interestingly, we are often unaware of the connotations that our dialect has on the ways that other people perceive us.
Many of us can remember the first time that we heard someone that sounded different than us (and our friends and family), maybe this first encounter with a different dialect was on a family vacation to a different area of the United States or perhaps it was when you came to orientation here at CCU or it could have been the first time that you watched a reality television show like Jersey Shore, Swamp People, or Honey Boo Boo. Regardless of the situation in which you first heard a dialect that was different than yours, you made judgments about the speaker, even if you had never met a person who spoke that dialect before. This reaction is a natural one, but unfortunately in some circumstances it can have negative consequences.
Imagine the Southern speaker who goes to the Northeastern United States and is perceived as being less intelligent because of her pronunciation of tire which sounds more like tar, despite the fact that she has graduated with honors from a university and is a successful business woman. Judgments of this sort can be quite harmful. However, there are benefits to speaking a dialect, as many times the use of dialect can help to build solidarity with other speakers of a similar dialect. Many of you may have had the experience of hearing someone on campus talking and you realize immediately that they are from your community or a community nearby, simply on the basis of the way that they talk and as a result you approach them and have now made a new friend.
JUST FOR FUN
Is it pop, soda, or coke that you like to drink? This dialect map indicates the regions of the U.S. and their linguistic style choice for a 'sweetened carbonated beverage.'
(Click to enlarge)
Want to see your personal dialect map? Find out here: "How Y'all, Youse, & You Guys Talk"
One of the most interesting parts of being a language user is that while we all speak a dialect, we all have command of a number of linguistic styles. As we mentioned before, these styles can range from formal to more informal, and the ability to change these styles, even in the middle of a conversation, is called style shifting or sometimes code switching. Speaking, though, is no different from writing in this way; we all shift the way that we write to meet the needs and expectations of our audience, just as we do when we are speaking.
You may not remember learning different styles of speaking but may be more aware of the different styles of writing that you use. You most likely acquired your various speaking styles from observing your family, friends, and teachers as you were growing up. Perhaps even your parents corrected your style when speaking with older relatives, their friends, or strangers. You may recall them saying not to say particular words, or to speak louder, or to speak more clearly — all of these requests were requests for you to change your speech style to meet the expectations of your audience.
In school you may have learned different styles of writing and every day you certainly read different styles of writing. What is important about all of these styles is that they are used to convey information, but more importantly that they also carry with them information that you interpret about your author or speaker and that you make judgments about the author/speaker and the quality of the information based on the style they use.
REACTIONS TO STYLE
One of the things that we all do is react to the linguistic style of those that we are engaged in a conversation with (spoken or written); even when speaking to people that we do not see or when reading the writing of those we do not know, we make assumptions about the "person on the other end." There are times when a person's style of communication may reveal something about them, but style is not a direct correlation to one's personality. We all perform different linguistic styles to meet the expectations of the current situation.
Take, for instance, your writing. You will write quite differently in your English course than you will write on Facebook, and even the way that you write on Facebook is different from how you write in text messages. In fact, it is likely that you use different styles of text messaging for different people. You have a wide repertoire to draw from, and you draw from this expansive style repository to make communication clear, effective, and generally pleasant.
Despite knowing that your speech or writing style is not a window into your personality, we all make assumptions about the people that we hear or about the writer whose prose we read. These assumptions are typically based on either some type of experience that we have had or on a social stereotype that we have encountered. Unfortunately, many times these judgments can have negative consequences.
Imagine a situation where you disregard the authority that an author has on a particular topic because they use I in a paper, only later you come to find out that they are a world-renowned expert on that particular topic. Or consider a situation where you assume that the person on the phone is much older than what they are, only to find out that they are a young person with a bit slower paced speech. All of these situations happen to us each day as we navigate the linguistic spaces where we live.
EXPLORING OUR VIEWS ON SHIFTING STYLES
Now that you have some background on style, we are going to explore some of the assumptions that you might have about some specific styles. Everyday we make assumptions about individuals' personalities, lifestyles, and social groups based on small observations. For example, think about shoes and clothes. If you see someone wearing calf-high combat boots and all black you make certain assumptions about what that person is like, and those assumptions would probably be different if you saw that same person wearing khaki shorts, a Banana Republic shirt, and Rainbow sandals.
Just as we make assumptions about people based on appearances, we also do this with the way people use language. Listen to the clips found below. You will hear two different clips of women expressing their views towards styles of language use in the North and in the South. As you listen, think about what assumptions the individuals are making about style and language, how it used, how it should be used, and the type of people that use language differently from themselves.
For citation, use:
Coastal Carolina University, Department of English, First-Year Writing Program. "Shifting Styles." Coastal Composition Commons, 24 August 2017, https://ccc.coastal.edu/task/shifting-styles/. Accessed xx xxxxxx xxxx.