"Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style..."
It is the study of the ways in which language is used to create style and meaning in literature and other forms of creative expression.
Literary Devices: The use of literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, simile, personification, etc. in a text and their impact on its meaning and style.
Grammatical Features: The study of grammar and how it affects the meaning and style of a text, including things like tense, voice, mood, and sentence structure.
Rhetorical Strategies: The use of rhetorical strategies such as repetition, parallelism, and antithesis in a text to make a point, persuade a reader, or create a certain effect.
Lexical Choices: The study of the words chosen by an author or speaker and how they contribute to the tone, meaning, and style of a text.
Speech Acts: The study of how language is used to perform actions or accomplish goals, such as making promises, giving orders, or expressing opinions.
Narrative Techniques: The use of narrative techniques such as point of view, plot, and characterization to create a particular effect or mood in a text.
Cultural Context: The study of how cultural factors such as gender, race, and class impact the meaning and style of a text.
Intertextuality: The study of how texts refer to, borrow from, or respond to other texts, and how this intertextuality affects their meaning and style.
Pragmatics: The study of how context affects the meaning and interpretation of language, including things like presuppositions, implicature, and speech acts.
Stylistic Analysis: The process of analyzing a text in terms of its style, including the use of literary devices, grammar, rhetoric, lexicon, and other features.
"...where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings."
"For example, the vernacular, or everyday language may be used among casual friends..."
"...while more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview."
"As a discipline, stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics."
"It can be applied to an understanding of literature and journalism as well as linguistics."
"Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news, non-fiction, and popular culture, as well as to political and religious discourse."
"Recent work in critical stylistics, multimodal stylistics and mediated stylistics has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones."
"Literariness, in other words, is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'."
"Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language..."
"...such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art..."
"...in the study of spoken dialects and registers..."
"...and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as literary criticism."
"Common stylistic features are using dialogue, regional accents and individual idioms (or idiolects)."
"Stylistically, also sentence length prevalence..."
"Stylistically, also language register use."
"Plain language has different features."
"Stylistics...inquiring upon semiotic associations in the potential for various kinds of conversations."
"Stylistics...focuses on phonetics."
"Stylistics...inquires upon the individual vocabulary and syntax of the separate speaker."