Take me to your cranberry morpheme
25 May 2012
Microstyle, by Christopher Johnson
Norton and Co, 2011
£14.99
ISBN-13: 978-0393077407
Microstyle is the style of the micromessage: the headline, the slogan, the tweet.
Christopher Johnson – who lives a double life as an academic linguist and brand consultant – sees microstyle everywhere. Look at film titles, headlines and advertising, and you’ll find it. But it emerges, also, in other contexts: on social sites and blogs, in texting and email. And microstyle is generating its own literary genres: Johnson cites the six-word story – much promoted by Smith magazine; he points to Ignite, home of the five-minute talk (“enlighten us, but make it quick”).
Microstyle, he thinks, responds to a new kind of reading: lazy, perhaps, and unfocussed, but above all guarded. Microstyle’s overarching aim is to grab the reader’s attention and keep it.
In these respects, microstyle isn’t so different from old-fashioned copywriting. One of the key differences is that the relationship between persuader and persuaded has shifted: no longer like management and labour, it’s now more like driver and pedestrian – a boundary anyone might cross several times a day. The Mad Men saw themselves as a professional élite, guardians of a dark art. Today, we’re all microstylers.
Johnson contrasts microstyle with what he calls ‘Big Style’. We write big when we write essays and dissertations, reports and books. Big style is the style of print. Language has always been a play of sounds in the air; but with print it also became objectified as visual marks. Text - the word's related to the word 'textile' - allowed writers to develop their material (note the metaphor) at length and in depth. Microstyle, in contrast, responds to the new, electronic media, where space, time and attention are all at a premium.
In fact, microstyle revivifies the old, pre-literate conventions of language use. The advertising slogan reinvents the proverb. The tweet – at its best – echoes the epigram. Look at the key characteristics of oral culture, as famously expounded by Walter J Ong in Orality and Literacy, and you’ll find pretty well all the features of microstyle.
Ong foresaw the renaissance of microstyle with his prediction of ‘secondary orality’: the convergence of literary and oral characteristics were already apparent to him in radio, television and mass advertising. Ong’s prescience was remarkable; he died before networked communications brought us Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere, in which secondary orality finds its apotheosis.
Johnson builds on this analytical tradition intelligently. Big Style historically separated writing from speaking. It codified, standardised and regulated language use in big dictionaries and books of grammatical rules. Big style generates a pervasive anxiety about being ‘correct’. Johnson is amusing about the ‘cute curmudgeons’ - the likes of Lynne Truss and Grammar Girl - who feed this neurosis while seeking to cure it.
And he’s not averse to good grammar.
But microstyle responds to the constant evolution of language – particularly spoken language – and delights in breaking rules. Where Big Style is sober and suited, microstyle is playful and irreverent. We’d love language more, suggests Johnson, if we shifted our linguistic focus from judgement and insecurity to curiosity and appreciation. Big Style, he says, generates style guides; microstyle, in contrast, needs a field guide. “I wrote this book,” he writes, “to let you observe words in the wild through a linguist’s eyes.”
It’s a refreshing ambition. To achieve it, Johnson mixes poetics and relevance theory with close analysis of microtexts drawn from a wide range of sources. The combination of approaches is sometimes uneasy, but it delivers remarkable insights.
In four sections – dealing with meaning, sound, structure and social context – Johnson shows how microstyle changes the relationship between writer and reader: from producer and consumer to collaborators in creating understanding. Big Style messages are containers of meaning. A micromessage is a key to meaning: the reader has to contribute their own experience and wit to unlock its significance. (Just as we do when we use a proverb.)
The book is full of other pleasures. Microstyle emerges from conversation and, at its best, evokes it. As a result, sound matters much more than it does in Big Style. We learn how rhythmic and sonic patterns capture our attention and imagination. Johnson suggests, among other things, that ‘feminine’ brands tend to be iambic (Chanel, Givenchy), and ‘masculine’ brands to be trochaic (Black and Decker). (I’m not entirely convinced, but it gets you thinking.)
We explore the delights of neologisms like awkwordplay and demetaphorization (using a conventional metaphorical expression in a context where it's literally true).
I particularly like cranberry morphemes. These are the meaningless parts of words that are left when you chop off the meaningful part (cran-, for example, in cranberry). Google the suffix -athon and you'll find some strange examples.
Johnson wants to revive rhetoric as a discipline to help us all understand and practise microstyle. His book is a serious contribution to this new rhetoric, and it more than fulfils its promise as a field guide. You’ll see – and use – language differently after reading it.