Style Mapping

The stylistics of Meg Cabot's Shadowland prominently feature straightforward, conversational word choice and a devil-may-care tone for the reader. Immediately in the beginning of the novel, "They told me there'd be palm trees. I didn't believe them, but that's what they told me." Cabot uses blunt, familiar words to make her protagonist easy to relate to in these first few sentences, using denotative language and a bit of humor. Similarly, P.C. and Kristin Cast's Chosen relies on familiar word choice in order to relate to the reader, a commonality in the pop fiction world. " 'Yep, I have a seriously sucky birthday,' I told my cat, Nala. (Okay, truthfully she's not so much my cat as I'm her person. You know how it is with cats: They don't really have owners, they have staff. A fact I mostly try to ignore.)" The Casts include friendly parenthesized declarations to the reader, taking on a style that suggests a "You know how that is?" attitude. On the opposite end of the literary spectrum, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is begun with, "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man come out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge." Picturesque and somewhat blunt all at once, Dostoevsky describes a man walking down a street in a sensuous, tangible string of words that sets an automatic environment for the scene at hand.