This study examines how stylistics is applied to the short story as a literary genre. For this linguistic study combining linguistics with literature, one of the most praiseworthy contemporary American short story authors Lorrie Moore’s short story “How To Be an Other Woman” is selected to be analyzed. Stylistic analysis of the story aims at revealing how Lorrie Moore organizes all linguistic components according to context and catches artistic and aesthetic unity with her usage of language. It indicates that stylistic analysis is not literary interpretation because inferences about literary texts in this study based upon linguistic foundation objectively. To be objective, the story is examined from the aspect of lexical, grammatical, figures of speech and narration categories. By the help of this essay, it is clearly understood that the effort stylistics is to set forth that linguistics and literature are indivisible parts.

Key words: stylistics, American short story, Lorrie Moore, literature, linguistics