Speech Culture and Stylistics
What to master
Speech culture covers orthoepic, lexical, grammatical and stylistic norms. Stylistics studies functional styles: scientific, official-business, publicistic, colloquial and artistic. Candidates should recognize qualities of good speech - correctness, accuracy, clarity, logic, purity, expressiveness and appropriateness - and identify typical errors: pleonasm, tautology, paronym confusion, wrong case government, broken lexical compatibility, and stylistic inconsistency.
Traps
Pleonasm adds a redundant word (свободная вакансия); tautology repeats a root (рассказать рассказ). Paronyms and false synonyms cause errors in official texts. Check government: согласно приказу, благодаря помощи, но вопреки прогнозу. Do not mix bookish and colloquial style in one sentence. A word may be correct in meaning but wrong in collocation: играет значение is incorrect; the norm is имеет значение or играет роль.
Worked example
Compare «Это играет большое значение» and «Это имеет большое значение». The first violates lexical compatibility; the second is normative. Rule of thumb: test the word in a stable collocation and check the style of the whole sentence.
Rule of thumb
Edit for norm and appropriateness together: a grammatically correct sentence can still be stylistically wrong.