A Stylistic Analysis of Manuel Arguilla’s How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife

Abstract

This study analyzed the writing style of Manuel Arguilla in ‘How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife’ in order to propose guidelines for describing writing style. The use of structural grammar helped describe the stylistic functions of words; the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; sentences; sentence length, structures, patterns, and voice; and local color: nativist diction. These features were identified, counted, and tabulated to describe the writing style of Manuel Arguilla. Hence, the writing styles revealed are vivid, jaunty, direct, smooth-flowing, and precise. The findings of the study and the effects of these linguistic features were the basis to come up with proposed guidelines for analyzing a writing style of an author. Based on the findings the conjunctions, the rhetorical type of sentences, and the other elements of local color are recommended for further analysis of styles.