The Stylistic Features Of English Instructions

With the development of society, in order to meet people's ever increasing demands of their material and spiritual life, new products of great variety spring up daily along with numerous instructions for them. Instructions play a great role in popularizing the products and helping customers accept and use them. Instructions may be written in various languages. Since English is the most widely used language in the world, this article focuses on English instructions as its object of study and analyzes their stylistic features systematically. Some Chinese linguists classified instruction into the genre of technical writing and touched upon their stylistic features. As for the stylistic features of English instructions, according to what I can obtain from the library and internet, there aren't any Chinese studying it in great detail. Some foreigners such as Laura Wright and Jonathan Hope, C'ecile Paris and Judy Delin talked a little about the stylistic features of English instructions from limited aspects. So far as I know, there isn't anybody studying the stylistic features of English instructions systematically. Thus this article can not only fill up the vacancy in stylistics, but can also provide guidance and referential materials for the understanding, translating and writing of English instructions.Trying to make the study exhaustive and specific, 50 native English instructions of various products are collected through many channels. These instructions are roughly classified into three types according to the products concerned, namely instructions for machines, instructions for medicines and instructions for food recipes. Then by way of comparison and statistic analysis, on the basis of the purposes of instructions, the stylistic features of English instructions are analyzed respectively on lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level.Different language choices produce different effects, so in order to fulfill the intended purposes of the instruction writers, appropriate language forms should beadopted. The aims of instructions are to explain, instruct, require or warn people. Accordingly, they should be succinct, accurate and unmistakable, detailed yet not redundant, direct and not flashy. The choice of vocabulary in English instructions bears the following characteristics: avoiding complicated words if simple words can do; using common and standard words rather than non-standard words such as slang, jargon, dialects or obsolete words. There are also meaning preference of words in English instructions, namely, mostly using the literal meaning rather than figurative meaning or extended meaning, using denotative meaning rather than associative meaning. For the sake of succinctness, many abbreviations are used; for the sake of accuracy, lots of figures appear; in order to make clear the sequence of some operating steps, many words indicating order are used in English instructions. Verbs in instructions are mostly dynamic verbs, stative verbs used rarely. As a kind of scientific writing, owing to the development of science and technology, new words naturally enter into instructions.Seen on syntactic level, sentences in English instructions are usually short and easy to understand. Most of them are simple and compound sentences. The components in simple sentences are often in regular order. Imperative sentences are most frequently used. Most typical complex sentence structures are those with adverbial clause indicating condition introduced by "if and adverbial clause indicating time introduced by "when". In order to be terse, phrases are often used in place of clauses or sentences and many kinds of omissions may occur. Based on Goldman's division of the relationship of sequential verbs into Generation and Enablement, the structure for expressing the sequential actions in English instructions are analyzed.Seen on the discoursed level, the frequent segmentation of English instructions is first expounded. It is pointed out that a lot of examples are given to help explain some difficult and c...