Evolution of the Official Style in Novels

Alyssa Weisbrod

“In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution” (Cervantes, 4).

This is an example from Don quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1615. This shows how prominent what we now know as the Official Style was, both in writing and in speaking. Although the Official Style is still used in a lot of scholarly and scientific writing, it is not used to the extent that it once was. At the time Cervantes was writing this novel, it was intended for the common person, mostly those who, in Cervantes opinion, were forgetting about the small enjoyments life has to offer. People who read it now, however, are most likely seeking it out, or looking for books from the same time period or genre and happen to come across it. This shows the evolution of the Official Style since the 1600s and how it went from simply the way that people spoke to each other, to being used in order to try and sound more educated and knowledgeable about a certain topic. In more recent books, certain aspects of the Official Style can be seen but, overall, the more recent books do not read the same as ones published centuries ago. Throughout this critique, I will examine the evolution of the Official Style in novels from different centuries.

To begin with the aforementioned example from Cervantes, the extent of the Official Style is more than that with which they spoke, even in the 1600s. The whole paragraph is only two sentences long. If someone was speaking to another person and wanted to get across the same point as is shown from the text, they would most likely break it up into as least four or five sentences. This is the aspect that is most obviously different in the writing from 1615 in comparison to the way people spoke to each other. The sentence arrangement and certain strategies of the Official Style, however, overlap between writing and speaking. In the first line of the paragraph, there is an absolute phrase to start everything off. This is a sentence strategy that is not as common as some others but is still used a significant amount. Other aspects of the Official Style are also very prominent in this example, including coordination, subordination, long sentences, and the use of semicolons. Simply by reading through just one paragraph from Don Quixote, you are able to notice the difference in the way that novels are written nowadays and you may even be able to pinpoint the exact time frame it was written just by the strategies that are used throughout it.

This has become the case throughout the centuries when it comes to novels. The sound of the writing has changed such a significant amount that you can tell when something was written based on just a small sample text from it. Looking at the 1700s, specifically 1726, when Gulliver’s Travels was written, the style of writing already starts to change. Although it is still obvious that it was not written recently, you can also tell that it was not written at the same time as Don Quixote. “He sent me to Emmanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years; and my father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do” (Swift). In this sample, you can see examples of coordination, absolute phrase, subordination, appositives, and relative clause. The use of semicolons is also very prominent and allows Jonathan Swift to write one extremely long sentence rather than breaking it down into more. This is a common technique now also because, when you put a piece of writing into a readability calculator, you will receive a higher grade if your sentences are longer. Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote do not differ as much because the way that people spoke to each other in both of those times periods was relatively similar.

When you look at Anna Karenina written by Leo Tolstoy in 1877, the change in the obvious use of the Official Style is much more prominent. “The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys” (Tolstoy). This reads a lot like much of what we read now in terms of novels. When you are reading this, you may not have to spend as much time trying to figure out the sentence arrangement because it is something that you are much more used to. Even though this is much easier to read than the two previous examples, there are still elements of the Official Style that can be seen. For example, appositive, relative clause, and coordination are some strategies that can be seen at first glance. During this time period, people spoke to each other differently than in the past. While they still tried to sound educated, they used more relaxed sentence structures and they did not try to sound so educated that it was confusing for the people around them. This could possibly be attributed to the fact that it was so long after the Shakespearean era that the effects of that type of communication were beginning to wear off. People still read Shakespeare plays but they did not regard them as the way people should speak to one another. This era can be noticed as the one where language and the way that people spoke to each other in conversation really began to change.

In 1900, Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book that most people know the story of, even if they never read the book or saw the movie. People now read this book at a very young age, something that is made possible by its simplistic style of writing. “When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else” (Baum). When reading this, it is not at all difficult to understand what is being said. It comes across more as a fun piece of writing for everyone to enjoy as opposed to the more academically written novels from previous centuries. Many books that are written more recently are similar the Baum’s book in the way that they are aimed toward the wide public rather that only at a specific group of people. This is not the case for the previous books. This helps with the popularity of the book and the fact that, if you went up to someone on the street and asked them what The Wizard of Oz is about, they could tell you but that is not necessarily the case for Don Quixote or Gulliver’s Travels.

When you compare the Flesch Kincaid Grade levels of all of these books, it is even more obvious to see the decrease in the obvious use of the Official Style through the many centuries. Those scores, in the order as they are seen through the critique, are as follows: 23.48, 23.45, 17.11, 9.46. This shows that more people are able to read something based on the recency of its publication. In other words, is something was written four centuries ago, less people are likely to have read it than something that has been published in the last century. Also, as seen with the more recent novels, they become more widely read if they are not written for a specific genre, but rather as something that most people can relate to. In conclusion, even though the Official Style is not seen as much in more recent writings if they are not scholarly or scientific, due to the fact that people no longer speak to one another in such a way, certain aspect of the Official Style can still be seen and a lot of people write with the Official Style without even realizing it.

All of the given texts have at least one or more techniques of the Official Style within them but to varying degrees. The closer to present day the books were written and published, the less obvious the Official Style is and the more you have to look for it. This can be attributed to the fact that people no longer spoke to each other in conversation using the Official Style so they used it less in their writing as well. Nowadays, people use the Official Style to sound more educated, even if that is not true about them, or to create a sort of shortcut in conversations within a certain discipline. When choosing a text to evaluate, I first decided to look at Don Quixote but later decided to look at all four texts in order to examine the evolution of the Official Style in novels. I have read Don Quixote, which is why I originally chose that to critique. When people talk about each of these texts, the way they speak about them changes based on the time period. For example, when Don Quixote was originally published, people talked about it in the same way that the book is written, with an extensive use of the Official Style because that is what they were used to during that era. Now, however, when people are talking about that same book, they use much simpler language. The language they use now, however, when talking about Don Quixote is much different than that which they would use when talking about The Wizard of Oz. This is because of the language and sentence strategies that are used in the books and also the content and audience of both of these pieces of writing. Some question that is left unanswered is why the use of the Official Style in everyday conversations, as well as in books, has diminished over time and when did it start to become noticeable?