The Official Style in Literary Articles

 

In this respect, Holmes does not fare much better. Like Dupin, he evokes the presence of dark forces within the exercise of reason—especially in Holmes’s early days, when he essentially amounts to a wannabe Dupin. In chapter 5 of A Study in Scarlet, Holmes appropriates Dupin’s ruse of placing a misleading ad in the newspaper to attract potential suspects. Much like his predecessor, Holmes asks Watson to “clean . . . and load” his old service revolver in preparation for any arrivals (Conan Doyle, Study 38). Holmes even borrows his personal mannerisms from Dupin: He manifests the same “vacant, lack-lustre expression” and the same “mental abstraction” (Study 26).

This gloomy portrayal of reason (and of the reasoner) already implies the romantic critique of the Enlightenment present throughout much of Poe’s oeuvre. At the same time, however, there is something heroic in the sleuth’s detecting abilities; the reader admires his uncanny skill. In this regard, Holmes, even more than Dupin, solidifies the image of the detective as an odd admixture of cultural typologies. On the one hand, Holmes appears the very model of an Enlightenment rationalist—designing chemistry experiments and developing his “Science of Deduction” (Study 23) as a fictional counterpart to Conan Doyle’s medical professor Joseph Bell. On the other hand, Holmes’s moodiness, messy “Bohemian” lifestyle, improvisations on the violin, and dabbling in hard drugs all paint a portrait of him as a typical romantic hero—a rebellious, solitary genius. Like many fictional detectives, Holmes fulfills both of these roles.3 Part Benjamin Franklin and part Lord Byron, he embodies the tension between Enlightenment and romantic legacies so characteristic of the genre, thereby building on a counterbalance first established in the ratiocinative tales created by that “American romantic,” Poe.

Prepositional Phrase - Subordination - Appositive - Coordination - Jargon - Passive Voice

Published in Spring of 2013, Sevik’s article, "Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment: Detection, Reason, and Genius in Tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle," was included in Vol. 31 of Clues: A Journal of Detection. The physical copy of this journal can be bought for $40 - $85, which includes many other articles all relating to detective literature. Online, Sevik’s article can be found on the website ResearchGate which is advertised as “a leading platform where the world’s scientists share their research and expertise, collaborate on projects, and engage with the best scientific content.” With more than 14 million members and 60 million monthly visits, researchgate.net allows anyone to view their articles for free with a downloadable PDF of each article.

Readability Statistics

Flesch Reading Ease score	35.9
Gunning Fog	16.3
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level	13.8
The Coleman-Liau Index	12
The SMOG Index	12.5
Automated Readability Index	13.8
Linsear Write Formula	15.7

The readability statistics of this article show that it is written by and for someone that has had some form of college education. Readability statistics allow for the author to know whether or not they are excluding certain people from understanding their ideas. Many reasons the harder an article is to read is due to the various aspects of the Official Style. One of the main aspects that usually makes an article sound like the Official Style is the use of passive voice by the author.

Passive voice is used to state something that already happened and to emphasize that the person who is writing it must have thought about it previously, and therefore, are credible in the eyes of the reader. Sevik uses passive voice to show how and why the examples from literature lead to a link between the famous detectives. I believe that the readability of an article has much to do with how much a person is interested in the subject – for example, a teen girl would more likely put the effort into understanding a well-written (perhaps even college level writing) article about a famous actor and his history, than putting effort into trying to understand a new scientific discovery. It is the same vice-versa – if someone who is very interested in astrology, they might not have as much trouble understanding a solar article as they would with reading a biography of the Queen. Therefore, although the official style is seen in many types of writing, I believe it can be easily overlooked if it is on the right subject.

For the crowd reading this article: usually literature majors or professors would enjoy reading about the connections between Sherlock Holmes and Dupin. Other people would most likely publish on this topic if they have some sort of passion for detective literature – if they have a new idea / theory to share, or if they needed to explain something to readers. As for this article, Sevik is relating two different pieces of literature to one another. The likely readers of this article, and other articles like it, would probably be either professors that are teaching detective literature or need to research something they needed help to understand, or it would be the same idea for students taking a detective literature course or – or possibly, someone is merely interested in both Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

           

 -Rebekah Schoos-

Further Reading:

Sevik, Greg. "Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment: Detection, Reason, and Genius in Tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle." Clues: A Journal of Detection (Mcfarland & Company), vol. 31, no. 2, Fall2013, pp. 20-31. EBSCOhost.