The Official Style: Redefined for Computer Programmers

The Official Style is typically found in contexts such as research articles, contractual or legal documents, scientific reports, or corporate reviews. But the style can be found outside of these contexts, as well. And each respective field requires information to be presented in different ways; thus, each field ends up with its own definition, or perhaps a dialect, of the Official Style. But some fields might have completely different rules of the Official Style. The usual forms, such as latinate diction, complex sentences, wordiness, and shapelessness don’t always apply. This is the case in the computer science field, where programmers become used to the Official Style as it exists in their field. This article is one example of the Official Style as programmers are used to it.

The article was written by an author through Oracle, the company that created the Java programming language. The author assumed that readers of the article would only be programmers in need of basic information pertaining to interfaces. He does, however, include information on where to find articles about more detailed aspects of Interfaces. The author also had to understand that each reader/programmer has different needs, has received a unique education, and learns in specific ways. (For simplicity, the rest of the article will use the word ‘reader’, which pertains to the programmers that access the article.) Because the author was tasked with writing an article to define the basics of an Interface for all readers completely, he also had to make it as widely accessible as possible. The Official Style of the Computer Science field offers guidelines on how to do that successfully, and the author follows those guidelines. If the article were to be written in a more creative or plain matter, the information the author is trying to convey might not be displayed in the best manner and it would fail to achieve its purpose.

            While learning languages, computer programmers become used to seeing certain problems. Obviously a problem must exist, otherwise there would be no reason to write a solution. So authors of educational texts tend to set up generic hypothetical situations for programmers learning the language in order to help them understand how a portion of code works. While it is a credible and easily understandable approach, it leads to some unfortunate bi-products in the writing. In this article, the author sets up one of these situations for the reader early:  “For example, imagine a futuristic society where computer-controlled robotic cars transport passengers through city streets without a human operator.” Because the situation is being established for the reader, the author is forced to use a slew of infinitive phrases: “...to make the car move...,” “...to command the car...,” “...to modify it...” The combination of this and the lengthy hypothetical situation presented can make the section of the article seem choppy. But this is one feature of the Official Style in the Computer Science field, and it makes the article accessible to the largest number of readers.

            At times, the article uses language that suggests it is shying away from a professional tone and moving towards an informal tone. As the author establishes the problem which persists throughout the article, he says, “Automobile manufacturers write software (Java, of course) that operates the automobile.” The middle quip, “Java, of course,” brings the formality down a bit, and reminds the reader this is a hypothetical situation. The idea of Java programs running cars is far fetched and sounds like a joke to computer programmers, but the author has to set aside reality in order to bring the problem down to a level that every programmer can relate to. While these kinds of examples lack creativity after reading even just a few, the broadness and simplicity of such problems allows the widest variety of programmers who access the article the best chance of understanding it.

A screen shot showing a code-example used in the article.

            There are a few sections of the article which would seem like jargon to someone not meant to read the article, that is, someone who doesn’t understand computer programming. “When an instantiable class implements an interface, it provides a method body for each of the methods declared in the interface.” These are everyday terms used by programmers, and they can account for the articles readability, which is about 14. However, the article also contains lengthy sections of text which is meant to be code, throwing off the readability scores. But this is just another aspect of the Official Style in the Computer Science field. Often times, leaving out section of code like this would render the article completely useless. The Official Style requires that code be included in articles and texts such as this; it is usually necessary for the reader to fully understand the topic material. So if the readability is adjusted by ignoring all sections of text that are code,  the readability score changes to 12.5. The change isn’t much, and the score shouldn’t be taken to mean the exact grade level, either. Many programmers might not start programming until college or later, but might be able to read well at a 14th grade level or higher. So the readability scores are nearly useless to this article.

            The average person wouldn’t be able to find many elements of the Official Style in this article. But this article isn’t meant for the average person--the usual rules of the Official Style do not apply. The author tailored the article in the Official Style of the Computer Science, using a simple situation and portions of code to explain the subject matter in the greatest detail. The Official Style might not always be creative or fun to read, but it is the best choice for clear communication.

By Ethan B.

#Globalwarming: An Official Style Critique

In a generation where scientific research, new discoveries, and remarkable innovations are occurring all around us, we often remain very unenthused, even unconscious to the work that goes into these new discoveries.  We, I included, are so familiar with this momentous growth in science and technology that we often expect it, rather than be surprised by it.  For example: When is the new iPhone coming out?  Why is global warming happening/ does going “green” really help?  Are the polar bears really dying?  (Don’t pretend like you haven’t been impatient about things like this).  We do not often go out seeking our own up-to-date information in these cases, but wait for popular news outlets and social media to keep us up to par on the newest experiments and research.  We live in a world now where we are apart of constant activity systems at all times.  We are always plugged into social media and news sites therefore they become the most accessible sources for our information.  I mean, who actually reads a scientific journal (no offense to those that do), when we can easily and clearly see that global warming is trending and learn our facts via twitter?

That question leads me into the world of Official Style, a term coined by Richard Lanham, as a style of writing that comes with a formal tone.  Lanham comments that often, legal, medical and scholarly documents find use in Official Style, but I am convinced that scientific reports can tip their hats to Lanham as well.  Although many science-based articles filled my Google search page, “Volcanic Aerosols, Not Pollutants, Tamped Down Recent Earth Warming” caught my eye.  The title within itself uses Official Style (use of appositive and strong diction: will explain later).  It is a science-based article that can be found on numerous scientific websites.  I chose to critique this article based off its evident use of jargon, yet upon further analysis pinpointed numerous tactics of the Official Style.

The article on the very surface is a conclusive summary of a study done on the chemicals released by volcanoes and how this could effect global warming.  I discovered that The University of Colorado Boulder originally published the article.  There is no by-line given, only a contact name for Ryan Neely, whom was found to be the Director and Research Associate for the Environmental Science Department at UCB.  When I originally had located the article it was on Science Daily, but it can be found on numerous science related sites like the government funded site, The National Science Foundation, a website that offers scientific as well as medical research.  The content within these sites seems targeted towards individuals within medical and scientific fields, not the general public.  Reasons for this belief is that after analysis, many of the articles were targeted to a reading level of 10^th or 11^th grade, some, like the analyzed one, even higher.  The average reading level for individuals in the United States is that of a 7^th grader, making these texts far superior to their comfortable reading ease.

Readability statistics for “Volcanic Aerosols, Not Pollutants, Tamped Down Recent Earth Warming” as followed:

Readability Formula	Grade
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level	16.2
Gunning-Fog Score	18
Coleman-Liau Index	13.7
SMOG Index	13.9
Automated Readability Index	17.3
Average Grade Level	15.8

The article relies on a very fact-based tone, that uses a lot of number findings, references to other research experiments/experimenters, and uses many acronyms for scientific groups and foundations.

A paper on the subject was published online in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors include Professors Brian Toon and Jeffrey Thayer from CU-Boulder; Susan Solomon, a former NOAA scientist now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Jean Paul Vernier from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; Catherine Alvarez, Karen Rosenlof and John Daniel from NOAA; and Jason English, Michael Mills and Charles Bardeen from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

That paragraph taken from the website offers absolutely no information on what the article is actually about, rather uses science jargon to name drop other scientific research regarding the volcanic issue.  Although these inclusions make the article seem more credible in a way, for a random public consumer, this entire paragraph holds no relevance and only becomes beneficial if we take the time to look up these people and their research contributions.  The entire article, in fact, uses this deferring tone, that never really concisely tells readers exactly what was discovered, nor how this benefits public consumers at all. In a fast-paced world, as stated in my introduction, consumers want immediate information, we want to know, who, what, where, when, why, and how, in less time than physically possible to answer all of these questions.  This article uses scientific jargon every other line, while implementing many other of the Official Style approaches and really does not give a clear nor brief idea about anything.

The study results essentially exonerate Asia, including India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead study author

Ryan Neely, who led the research as part of his CU-Boulder doctoral thesis.

The above sentence holds more than 40 words.  It is the very first sentence within the article, and already begins to confuse.  “Exonerate” is a scholarly way of saying “to exempt” or “to take blame off of”.  Not being familiar this word becomes hazardous, because when continuing to read the sentence, it claims that the countries increased their emissions.  Because of this, on first glance at this opening sentence, it made me think exonerate meant the exact opposite.  Without knowing what “exonerate” meant, I thought the article was blaming Asia, when in fact it was definitely not.  This sentence also has many appositives. Appositives are often used within official style and can be defined by Purdue Owl as “a noun or pronoun—often with modifiers-- set beside another noun or pronouns to explain or identify it”.  As you can see, the above sentence is filled with them (in bold).  The use of appositives relies heavily on presenting more and more information within the sentence.  Often this helps further explain ideas, yet other times it only jumbles words and makes text harder to comprehend. The author could have simply said:

The Earth did not warm as much as expected in 2011.  The study showed that volcanoes are the reason.  Surprisingly Asia was not to blame for this.  China and India did burn a lot of coal between 2000 and 2010, and could have put a lot of sulfur dioxide into the air, but according to Ryan Neely, this is not enough to point fingers at these countries for the temperature drop.  

(This was my own way of changing that opening sentence into plain style, making it much more easily understood, in my opinion.)

            As earlier promised, the title would be explained:

“Volcanic Aerosols, Not Pollutants, Tamped Down Recent Earth Warming”

In this case, the appositive is “not pollutants”.  This appositive does not seem overly hard to understand, but in conjunction with strong diction, (word choice) such as “tamped”, can often add to the scholarly and often confusing passive tone.

            As one can see through only a short analysis, uses of Official Style are apparent within this article.  In a way, this makes a lot of sense.  Although some outliers may exist, many of the people, within this scientific activity system, regarding this article, would have some formal training within this field or some scientific background.

The use of Official Style makes perfect sense in these instances, because scientific jargon, strong diction, etc., are common amongst departments like this.  I am aware that in a way I am accusing articles like this as being worthless to general consumers and am prepared to further my argument, if so be it, but it only makes sense that articles written like this, be solely for people within the field.  And this definitely could be the case; maybe these articles have no intent to satisfy the common-folk.  But in the case that they are trying to reach out to average readers, as I stated before and will restate now, our generation is constantly in a high-speed mode.  We prefer information to be neatly packaged for us in a concise, easy to read, and easily accessible manner.  Outlets such a scientific journals, seem much inferior than quickly checking into twitter, or turning on the news.  Richard Lanham’s Official Style is beneficial in many cases to many activity systems, yet in this case; to normal web-surfers coming across this article (like myself) it just does not work.   These scientific journals make no apparent purpose to keep information classified, for it is easily found online.  Maybe they do not care, and maybe they should not, but these are the kinds of texts that consumers gain no insight from.  They are simply to far out of a common activity system.  I, and can assume that many others, would find it much more beneficial to simply look up #Globalwarming.  But to each, their own. 

By: Hannah K.

The Perfect Strategy: A Scholarly Spin on Gender Advocacy

Statement:  “Personal testimony seems to produce credible counter-arguments within the realm of scholarly research that strives for a binary system of classification.”

A Critique of the Official Style:

Gender Copia: Feminist Rhetorical Perspectives on an Autistic Concept of Sex/Gender

The scholarly article I chose to critique was originally published in the Women’s Studies in Communication Journal in 2012.  Key concepts from this article include Autism, gender identification, rhetoric, Copia, and queer theory.  This article resonates with my field as I am an interpersonal communication major with a focused interest in identity-development.  I find the process of becoming and then articulating individualism very interesting.  This article, written by Jordynn Jack through the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, gives a voice to Autistic individuals who are so often clumped together in stereotypical assumptions by the academic and medical establishments.  The author clearly composed the given article with an intention to counter the mainstream assumptions associated with both Autism and the binary-system of gender identification.  The Official Style is apparent throughout the article with a lot of jargon regarding the topic and overall, a very intellectual organization of thoughts that categorize it in the 15^th grade level.  However, the author strategically uses concise language and sentence structure due to the fact that there is a bigger social issue being addressed.  Trickery is not the intention of this article.  In terms of broader implications, this piece is significant as it focuses on marginalized communities.  Advocacy work like this has an important role with the world of the Official Style.  A professional demeanor is applicable in the given context as conversations about gender identity follow inclusion.  An article like this has implications in the creating process.  Including words from the specific community, created by the specific community, for the inclusion of the specific community fosters growth and expansion in rhetoric and society, as a whole. 

  With this said, this article calculated the following results through the Readibility Scorer:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level-15.3

Average Grade Level-15.5

Characters per Word-5.2

Syllables per Word-1.8

Words per Sentence-24.9 

My working draft led me to develop the argument that personal testimony gathered through the author’s data collection (interviews with individuals) produced credible counter-arguments to mainstream assumptions regarding Autism and gender-identification.  The author began the article with quoted statements by individuals who have been associated somewhere along the Autism-Scale.  This scale points out that Autism is varying and plays out through a spectrum.  The author’s basic argument lies in this interpretation; one cannot classify Autism.  The author is arguing that assumptions from the academic and medical world leaves individuals out and without rhetoric to associate with; therefor, the process of invention that comes from fighting the binary-system of gender (male or female) plays in to Autistic individuals also countering rigid classifications of how ze (this is a term used in gender studies, and it is gender neutral) will interpret the world.  This critique is aiming to highlight the author’s ability to use a very scholarly format that absolutely must incorporate the Official Style in order to stimulate the academic world while simultaneously giving a voice to “simple folks” who do not format their explanations in the Official Style but who give a first-person perspective to the major topics discussed in this article.  The testimony used, in my opinion, is so much stronger than any type of Official format with citations and notable research.  For example, Jackk quotes an interviewee who identifies as an Autistic male.  Jackk (pg. 1) quotes the interviewee:

When I see ‘gender’ as a tick-box category on a form, I feel similarly to if, on a form asking for details of a vehicle, it asked for ‘miles per gallon’ when my vehicle was powered by something completely different (and that can’t be measured in gallons), like say solar electricity—I just don’t really consider myself to belong to the category of beings that have gender.

This writing, simple yet very powerful, has a greater effect on the reader than the following sentence composed by Jackk (pg. 2):

In particular, an autistic perspective points to the usefulness of a rhetorical
model for understanding gender, one that considers gender as providing a range of available discourses through which individuals make sense of, model, and perform a gendered identity. While communication scholars have focused heavily on how gender identities are disciplined (Sloop), performed in oratory (see Buchanan; Mattingly), or constrained by cultural discourses (Johnson), we have fewer accounts of how the formation of gender identities themselves, especially nontraditional ones, constitutes a rhetorical process.

In this excerpt, Jackk uses complex sentence structure, incorporating euphemistic tactics that, in all honesty, probably have to be used in order to resonate with scholars.  The terms “cultural discourse, gender identities, rhetorical processes” are correct terms for the given fields of study; however, in terms of effective writing, the first quote from the Autistic gentleman makes such a stronger point.  Hearing his perspective of gender identity makes any quoted material from a scholar seem ignorant.  Jackk uses testimony like this throughout the article, combining her developed articulations for the academic world’s approval with simple, real, and credible accounts of what she is trying to explain. 

Here is another sentence I found that represented Jackk’s (pg. 14) style well:

While these findings cannot be taken as representative of autistic individuals as a whole, their diversity does support an expanded concept of autistic gender identity that pushes past a gender continuum toward a copia, in which terms can be tried on and appropriated, discarded, and invented while still being understood as embodied and constructed.

I see both elements of Official Style with a slow opening to the main action of the sentence.  Also, the author really takes on a passive voice in this example.  I would say that throughout the article, her voice is strong for an example of the Official Style.  Her style is very euphemistic.  That may be due to the fact that a lot of these concepts are unfamiliar terms.  Nominalization occurs with a lot of these terms, for example “continuum”.  I found this article under EBSCO Host, through Murphy Library, so naturally I am expecting the Official Style in diction as well as format.  This is clearly a qualitative research presentation with data analysis and thematic content that allows the scholarly type to mosey through in the comfortable box that is APA Land. 

After closer examination, I am convinced that Jackk is a true rhetorician, using the method as a tool of creation.  Maybe I am biased, but it seems like the implications of zer research and rhetoric affect multiple activity systems.  It is the perfect interwoven web of scholarly language and articulation along with personal testimony and first hand, credible accounts of the topic being discusses by real people, with names and identities that they choose; it is not decided, and therefore, it is controversial.  From the following quotation from Jackk (pg. 6), we can see the connections being created between real people and the rhetoric available for further confirmation breaking down previous stereotypes and binary systems of gender and identity:

Despite the difficulties of orienting oneself around a stable gender category, the

topic of gender provides a point of identification for autistic individuals with nontraditional gender identities. On message boards and blogs, individuals share experiences with alternative gender self-concepts in ways that might be confirmatory. Rhetoric scholar Bryan Crable notes that this kind of interactional rhetoric can be crucial to establishing a secure identity.

The last sentence is a strategic incorporation of confirmation.  The conclusions made by Jackk, from the testimony of the interviewers, is backed up by Rhetoric scholar Bryan Crable – nice name drop. I do not intend on making fun of Jackk, however, because this is extremely effective.   Jackk is simultaneously involving two very opposing bodies with each other by an outcome of scholarly truth that is representative and inclusive, and that is not simple.  I still wonder if strategy is bleeding into trickery.

            With trickery in mind, I critically question the sincere reaction of both parties: the marginalized gender-queer community and the medical institution deeply invested in Autism.  Both parties are so far left and then right on the whole concept of categorization.  As much credit as I give Jackk for zer strategic blend of Official Style and personal testimony, a lack of defense on either side might leave both parties unsatisfied and under-represented.  However, Jackk does a great job of being unbiased because I assume ze is closely invested in the trans-community.  This article may not be giving the trans-community a strong enough voice, and if that is the case, then what exactly does it do? Does it tip-toe around the scholarly crowd, offending no one? If so, then it may be satisfying the scholarly system, and in doing so, failing to reach the outcomes of the trans-community.    

-Brianna B.