Style of language

Style

The language used in Push is extremely informal throughout the novel, reflecting the sociolect that Precious speaks and directly supporting the novel’s characterization of her.

Thus, words are often left out, the grammatical rules of standard English are frequently broken, and many words or phrases are spelled phonetically or contracted in various non-standard ways. Almost every single page of the novel contains multiple examples that show this informal style in action, so you should have no trouble finding further examples:

For me this nuffin’ new. There has always been something wrong with the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an’ my muver - my whole family, we more than dumb, we invisible. (p. 30)

Secon’ grade they laffes at HOW I talk. So I stop talking. What for? Secon’ thas when the ‘I’mma joke’ start. When I go sit down boyz make fart sounds wif they mouf like it’s me fartin’. When I git up they snort snort hog grunt sounds. I I jus’ stop gettting up. (p. 36)

When looking at the sections of the story that depict Precious’ journal entries, the style typically deviates even further from standard English, as the entries are meant to show Precious’ level of writing at those particular points in the story. Interestingly, this also means t...