Author: Ben Yagoda, Writing for Grammar Girl

For me, peak advertising anthimeria arrived during this year’s U.S. Open tennis tournament. A commercial for Lexus, with the slogan “Experience amazing,” was immediately followed by one for Deloitte, with its tagline, “Together makes progress.” Later, there was an Edward Jones ad, cajoling us, “Let’s find your rich.” When the actual tennis came on, you could see a sign on the side of the court, promoting the tournament: “Spectacular Awaits.”  What the slogans had in common was the rhetorical device of anthimeria, also known as functional shifting, which means the use of a word as a different-from-usual part of speech.…

Some years ago I wrote a book called “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.” In it I tried to get at some of the elements — other than content — that make strong writers’ prose distinctive and immediately identifiable: their stylistic fingerprint. To illustrate the general concept, I used the example of contractions. Consider two sentences: “I do not like green eggs and ham.” And “I don’t like green eggs and ham.” The meaning (obviously) is identical. But the sound, the voice, is quite different. Most of us aren’t a Hemingway, or a Samuel Beckett, or a Dr.…