Style

Many linguists follow their famous French colleague Charles Bally, claiming that Stylistics is primarily the study of synonymic language resources.

STYLE
Leech and Short (1981, p. 11) define style as ‘the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on’. In other words, style is by no means restricted to the style of a particular author, but can be characteristic of a situation, a character, a particular text, a particular linguistic expression that is investigated over time and so on. Hence, style may be seen as a particular way of writing or speaking. This is where the points of intersection between style, stylistics and rhetoric are most pervasive.

Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman.

Functional stylistics, which became and remains an international, very important trend in style study, deals with sets, "paradigms" of language units of all levels of language hierarchy serving to accommodate the needs of certain typified communicative situations. These paradigms are known as functional styles of the language.

STYLE
"a system of coordinated, interrelated and interconditioned language means intended to fulfil a specific function of communication and aiming at a definite effect."
I. R. Galperin

All scholars agree that a well developed language, such as English, is streamed into several functional styles. Their classifications, though, coincide only partially: most style theoreticians do not argue about the number of functional styles being five, but disagree about their nomenclature.

The rather widely accepted classification:
1. official style, represented in all kinds of official documents and papers;
2. scientific style, found in articles, brochures, monographs and other scientific and academic publications;
3. publicist style, covering such genres as essay, feature article, most writings of "new journalism", public speeches, etc.;
4. newspaper style, observed in the majority of information materials printed in newspapers;
5. belles-lettres style, embracing numerous and versatile genres of imaginative writing.

It is only the first three that are invariably recognized in all stylistic treatises. As to the newspaper style, it is often regarded as part of the publicist domain and is not always treated individually.

But the biggest controversy is flaming around the belles-lettres style. The unlimited possibilities of creative writing, which covers the whole of the universe and makes use of all language resources, led some scholars to the conviction that because of the liability of its contours, it can be hardly qualified as a functional style. Still others claim that, regardless of its versatility, the belles-lettres style, in each of its concrete representations, fulfils the aesthetic function, which fact singles this style out of others and gives grounds to recognize its systematic uniqueness, i.e. charges it with the status if an autonomous functional style.

Each of the enumerated styles is exercized in two forms - written and oral: an article and a lecture are examples of the two forms of the scientific style; news broadcast on the radio and TV or newspaper information materials - of the newspaper style; an essay and a public speech - of the publicist style, etc.

Tips for writing a features article
Tips for writing a features article | International Development Journalism competition | The Guardian
Don't worry if you have never written an article before, read some top tips for people who are brand new to feature writing
Here are some basic tips for people who are new to feature writing:
Cover the essential elements of who, what, when, where, how and why
Put the most important things at the beginning, preferably in the first paragraph
Plan out what you are going to say beforehand

Look at your chosen theme carefully. Consider the questions suggested and attempt to answer some of them
But remember: you need an "angle" - a way to focus your feature. You can't answer all of those questions. This is journalism, and journalism needs to be new and original. That's why an "angle" is important: even if your topic has been covered in the past, there will always be something new to say.
You need quotes. But if these quotes have been gathered by someone other than you, and in particular if they have already been published, you MUST say where they came from. If you don't, this is plagiarism and you will be disqualified.

General Structure of a Research Article
Title
Abstract
Keywords
Main text
Introduction
Methods
Results
Discussion

Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Supplementary Data