1 is journalistic; 2 is nursery; 3 is academic and 4 novelistic.

To follow a story, very young children need events to be explained slowly and with repetition. Hence the spoken and highly redundant nature of the nursery style.

The novelistic style, typical of a million airport paperbacks, dramatizes the situation through dialogue and description. Here 50 words convey more information - notably about the weather conditions - than the 75 words in nursery style.

The journalistic style seeks to catch and keep the reader's attention through a lively, often humorous, approach. This usually demands a conversational style using rhetorical questions, fragments and phrases rather than full sentences, quick shifts of tone, and a variety of sentence lengths.

Academics do not usually write about bears that eat porridge, but if they did it might be like this, with the three bears mentioned in a subordinate clause, in a 37 word sentence about Goldilocks.

Naturally I would not recommend the academic style with a three-year-old! But we have grown up now and moved on from bears eating porridge to sociology, history, management theory, economics, psychology and so on. Nor do we need to grab the attention of the audience with journalistic fireworks. We assume our intelligent audience is as interested as we are in the complexities of the subject. So please, proceed to the main part of the course.

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