Register
One important quality of writing we are working to distinguish is something called "register," and the varieties of register in writing and/or reading. Register is a term used in musicology to mean a range of notes possible for an instrument to play, except that here we are looking at register within language use, and especially within performances of writing and reading. For instance, the spectrum from the concrete to the abstract and all steps in between would constitute an "octave," and so would other registers that constantly are at play as ways of "reading for" that we bring into any reading situation.
I suggest that the practice of distinguishing register at work in a given text would also allow us to distinguish how we project and perform with a particular register whenever we read or listen, and of course, when we write. Once you can distinguish registers, then you can "hear" or "see" them in actual texts. In fact, you might even consider that registers do not exist per se except in those moments when we distinguish them. You can't catch what you can't see, and you can't write what you can't read.
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In How Writers Read, we begin with three terms that imply an understanding of register: the mimetic, the thematic, and the synthetic. Below is a more elaborate exploration of register that includes these three terms while also moving beyond them to also indicate what registers you will be dealing with for each reading.
I have adapted the following four registers (ranges) of language use from Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction to Poetics, pages 21-26:
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Reading One
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The first register is “concrete versus/and abstract” language. At one end of the spectrum of this register, concrete language use calls for very precise particularities. At the other end of the spectrum we find wide generalities that often lack any real content.
Concrete language often serves to imitate what the audience expects to be "real," otherwise known as the "mimetic" register. Mimesis is that quality of narrative that appears to duplicate, or represent "reality" as we experience it in everyday life, such that the audience may suspend disbelief and enter the narrative world as if it is real, which furthermore permits various degrees of investment in the characters pursuing desire in conflict with others in a "world."
Abstract language evokes responses to the thematic dimension of the narrative, which may include issues that are ethical, cultural, social, political, philosophical, etc. This may also be understood as "diegesis," when the reader understands the narrator or writer speaking and interpreting, telling the story rather than allowing the scene to show us the story.
Undeveloped narratives often rely too heavily on abstract language, or diegetic exposition, rather than allowing the mimetic effect of concrete language, otherwise known as writing "in-scene," to do its work. Chuck Palahniuk provides excellent instruction for writers wishing to shift their dominant "abstract" register to the "concrete" in this short essay. However, writing that is highly reflective employs the thematic effectively. In other words, there is always a time and place to write in any given register.
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Keep in mind that when you write or evaluate writing, any position along the range of a given register has its value while at the same time poses a problem. It is important to examine both aspects of each register in a given piece of writing.
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