Prose styles, genres, and levels of analysis.

Defining style or determining how to analyze it has frequently been pronounced problematic, but recent work on another problematic concept--genre--can help clarify our understandings of style. The increasing attention to non-fictional genres now coming from discourse studies--the interconnected fields of rhetoric and composition and applied linguistics--often makes little mention of style, but it nevertheless helps illuminate parallels between patterns of genres and patterns of styles. I review here some of the ways in which work on written, but non-fictional, genres can help…