The stylistics of belief is the study of the ways in which language is used by speakers to express their beliefs, to convince other people they are right, or to avoid committing themselves to particular beliefs. Such study can contribute to an understanding of the ways in which people misuse and manipulate language for their own ends. The underlying belief system of the speaker, what linguists and philosophers call presuppositions, determines the choice of syntactic construction and specific words in a given utterance. The term "style" presupposes that there is not a single way of saying what we have to say, but in fact that we have available to us many possible choices for expressing outselves. The choice of style, however, is limited by our presuppositions, our estimation of our audience, and the contextual limitations dictated by our cultural expectations. Two linguistic areas that relate to analysis of style are syntax and word-choice. Syntactic exploitation refers to the use of sentence structures that permit deletion of linguistic material when deletion occurs in contexts where the reader is unable to recover the deleted material. Exploitation through word-choice can be divided into two types: the use of words for their emotional effect, their connotations, and for labeling; and metaphors. (WR)