Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Stilistics is the study of form and style in language expressions. The style of a text can be defined as the unique proper subset of the set of all possible characteristics of a text. A literary genre can be seen as a subset of characteristics that is commonly recognised and agreed upon. It is commenly recognised a detective story should involve a crime and how it was solved, a love story should describe romantic relations between protagonists and the turmoils it can bring, an advertisement should promote some product, a fable should involve animals having human characteristics, etc. Another characteristic is the size of a work. We can distinguish for example between a poster, a flyer, a pamphlet, an essay, a short story, a novel or a trilogy, to name but a few. More at the sentence/paragraph level are two (relatively) well-defined mutually-exclusive categories of style: proze and poetry. The latter involves rhyme while the former does not. Other possible characteristics at the paragraph level can be: the use of dialog, the description of scenes, the use of active or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of specific language registers etc. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.