What this book refers to as the "neutral" style, tone, or register is the language of the middle ground, neither formal nor informal and based on the standard vocabulary of English. It is the language that most people find most natural and easy to use for writing. It does not directly imitate speech, but it should be speakable without sounding stilted. To call it neutral may suggest that it is colorless or lifeless. But those are, in fact, merely connotations of the word neutral. It is possible to be witty, humorous, serious, dignified, businesslike, affectionate, passionate, critical, condemnatory, and downright rude without stepping over its boundaries. Its chief virtue is its scope and flexibility. On the one hand, it is usable for most ordinary writing purposes; on the other, it can be made more formal or more informal as the occasion demands without necessarily entailing a shift into outright formality or informality. And if you do wish to change your tone in the course of a piece of writing, it is easier to move up or down a category if you start from a roughly central position.The text of this book is meant as an extended example of the neutral style, and most of its illustrative examples fall within that category. In this particular context, however, it is perhaps appropriate to give a specific example that helps to distinguish it from formality and informality:The painting shows an elderly man and his wife standing in front of a building that might be a church. The man is holding a pitchfork. He has a rather suspicious expression on his face, while his wife looks distinctly disapproving. In an informal style, that text might read,The picture shows an old guy and an old lady standing in front of a place that looks like a church. The old guy is holding a pitchfork, and they both look pretty sour. A more formal writer might, however, put it like this:The painting depicts an elderly couple whose facial expressions are suspicious, in the case of the man, and severe, in the case of the woman. Behind them stands a building with certain ecclesiastical features. The man is holding a pitchfork. The neutral version is more precise than the informal one; it specifies that the object being described is a painting as opposed to a picture (which might mean a photograph), but it is quite content with the ordinary verb show, whereas the formal version prefers the less ordinary depict. Likewise, the neutral version avoids the complex construction in the first sentence of the formal one (… an elderly couple whose facial expressions are suspicious, in the case of the man, and severe, in the case of the woman …) in favor of describing the expressions of the elderly couple in a separate sentence that has an easier and more natural flow. At the same time, however, the casual humor of the informal version (they both look pretty sour) would be out of keeping with the neutral tone, so it has to suggest humor more gently (his wife looks distinctly disapproving).Not surprisingly since it represents a middle state, the neutral style has some aspects in common with the informal and some in common with the formal style. It is, however, distinct from both, as these examples show, and is, when well handled, fully as colorful or as dignified as the one or the other.
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