In Chapter 5, Lanham writes (talks) about voice (in writing). He is amplifying what he has been saying all along in Analyzing Prose. Different voices come through different styles. Prose is shaped by style. Voice is shaped by style. Point of view and meaning are shaped by style. Understanding how a piece is written is essential to fully understand what that piece is trying to get across.
This follows from what Lanham has been saying from the beginning of the introduction. Writing is much more like speaking than the stilted language of textbooks. Writers have individual personalities, and they come out of their prose in different ways. They use style to accomplish this feat of telepathic time travel, beaming from their time and mind to ours, becoming distinct -- through style.
Prose is one of the most flexible forms of communication we have. The same things that define our speech -- vocabulary, cadence, diction, rhythm -- appear in our writing, with similar effect. The subtle difference is that you can get away with things in speech that become glaringly obvious in writing, and so writing has to be more careful. More choosy about what tactics it employs, and when. Repetition is more jarring when repeated on the page, and alliteration more alarming. At the same time, reading aloud a piece of writing is a way of teasing out the writer's unique style in any given piece.
When Lanham writes about parataxis and hypotaxis, running and periodic styles, saccades, suspension, parallelism, anaphora, and isocolons, he is explaining the tools, or elements (if you will) of style. Strunk & White were unnecessarily prescriptive, but they popularized a great phrase.
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