Style as a Rhetorical concept

The forest of rhetoric defines style as:

"Style concerns the artful expression of ideas. If invention addresses what is to be said; style addresses how this will be said. From a rhetorical perspective style is not incidental, superficial, or supplementary: style names how ideas are embodied in language and customized to communicative contexts (see Content / Form).

Because of the centrality of style, rhetoricians have given great attention to every aspect of linguistic form—so much so that rhetoric has at times been equated with (or reduced to) "mere style," as though rhetoric were concerned only with superficial ornamentation.

But ornamentation was not at all superficial in classical and renaissance rhetoric, for to ornament (ornare = "to equip, fit out, or supply") meant to equip one's thoughts with verbal expression appropriate for accomplishing one's intentions.

Upon this basic principle of style there has been agreement, but less so respecting how matters of style have been mapped within the rhetorical tradition, especially with respect to categorizing the figures of speech."


Ulmer did not specifically discuss style, but he did emphasize the form of certain narratives, such as the haiku form and high-style.

On page 46, Ulmer discusses Barthes perspective on haiku imagery:
"haiku is not a model but a relay showing how to move beyond the antidefinition of modernist poetics to the use of imaging as a mode of reason. The lesson is not to abandon logic for poetry, but to see that images may be a mode of logic that opens up a different dimension of experience for thought."

Page 196 explains the definition of high concept:
"A manifestation of the X-Y dialogic of the riddle in entertainment practices is known as 'high concept,' the one-liner captions used to pitch and even to write narratives..."
On page 197, he talks about high concept, and even references haiku:
"The mystory is a high concept meeting of discourse figures whose only connection is you. High concept is Hollywood haiku."

Basically, Ulmer takes style and relates it to what is very important in switching from literacy to electracy: brevity. He emphasizes not ornamenting one's words with descriptive qualifiers, but conveying the most meaning possible in as little space as possible. This ties into the remix technology and the short attention span that consumers have these days. All in all, Ulmer marries an important rhetorical concept and an important Internet concept into what consumers want these days.

Style is what my career is all about: embellishing content in order for the content to be more easily swallowed.