English Stylistics — LET Practice Questions

Technical documents use formal language — precise, professional, and free from slang. "Encryption" is a serious, specialized word used carefully to mean exactly one thing. There's no joking around, no daily-life slang, no poetic comparisons. That careful, precise style is the textbook definition of formal language.

Tip: Technical writing + specialized terms = formal register.

Foregrounding is when a writer breaks a normal language pattern on purpose so the deviation stands out and creates meaning. Example: instead of writing 'He went, came, and died,' a writer writes 'He went. He came. He died.' — three short clipped sentences in a row. The repetition and abrupt rhythm aren't normal English; they push the reader to notice and feel the bareness of the life being described. The unusual pattern itself becomes part of the meaning. Foregrounding is a specialist concept in stylistics and assumes the reader can tell what 'normal' usage looks like, which is what makes the deviation visible.

Lexical cohesion is what holds a text together through word choice — by repeating key terms, using synonyms, antonyms, or words from the same family. Example: in a Filipino high-school biology lesson, students see 'cell,' 'cytoplasm,' 'nucleus,' 'organelle,' 'membrane' across paragraphs; those repeated and related words keep the reader on-topic without using grammatical connectors like 'because' or 'however.' Halliday and Hasan introduced the term in their work on text cohesion, alongside grammatical cohesion (reference, conjunction, ellipsis).