Terse, Matter-of-fact
All The Pretty Horses is no love-fest, that's for sure. To match this, the writing style is minimalist: the narrator uses only enough language to describe what's happening, and hardly any more.
As we talked about in the section on "Narrator Point of View," the narrator tends to skip description of certain details or events, leaving the reader to infer them on his or her own, or describes them through reactions or changes in other things.
McCarthy doesn't even use proper punctuation or spelling for dialogue. He doesn't set off dialogue with quotation marks, so sometimes you may have to read a few words before you realize that a character is speaking instead of the narrator. When speaking, the main characters frequently substitute "should of" for "should have," and frequently drop apostrophes (as in "dont" instead of "don't"). This lack of proper English aligns with the main characters' lack of formal schooling and the rugged frontier setting of the novel. There aren't a lot of commas, and the narrator frequently uses conjunctions (like "and"), which speeds up the pace of the language.
While the novel is short on descriptions of characters and their emotions, it is often expansive in its description of actions, landscape, and setting. Just look at this two-sentence paragraph describing John's return to the town of La Encantada:
He rode all night and in the first gray light with the horse badly drawn down he walked it out upon a rise beneath which he could make out the shape of the town, the yellow windows in the old mud walls where the first lamps were lit, the narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness. He dismounted and unrolled his plunder and opened the box of shells and put half of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it was loaded all six cylinders and rolled his gear back up and retied the roll behind the saddle and mounted the horse again and rode into town. (3587)