That 'Marvelous Machine' and Stylistic Analysis.

Stylistic analysis by both rhetoricians and literary critics is incomplete, often subjective, impressionistic, and sometimes misleading. The ideal method is objective analysis, based on adequate verbal samples, which identifies and describes the style of any writer or speaker as distinctive to that person alone. In order to do this, the theories and methods of linguistics must be applied through the use of computers. A couple of efforts in computer stylistics demonstrate the advantages of computerized data analysis for responsibility to the texts and the complex properties of language. Humanists must become acclimated to this use of technology through recognition of outstanding computer-assisted stylistic studies and through courses in the computer languages widely used in humanistic applications. (JM)