with bill labov serving as the external examiner for his phd dissertation, bell modeled his research in a similar manner that labov had done by looking at the similarities and differences of different radio stations through varying social class audiences. bell alluded in his dissertation that he applied vslx methods to the study of newspaper language: "and i remember writing you know from new zealand such a distant star in the linguistic universe. transformational grammar said, "you can't do this kind of work" you know studying news language to see how style works. you know there's no way to do this. it varies. we don't do "vary." well, i discovered that there were these people who had started to study variation and that made possible what i did."