Style
A
WRITER’S STYLE IS WHAT SETS HIS OR HER WRITING APART and makes it unique. Style
is the way writing is dressed up (or down) to fit the specific context,
purpose, or audience. Word choice, sentence fluency, and the writer’s voice —
all contribute to the style of a piece of writing. How a writer chooses words
and structures sentences to achieve a certain effect is also an element of
style. When Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he
arranged his words to convey a sense of urgency and desperation. Had he written
“These are bad times,” it’s likely he wouldn't have made such an impact!
Style
is usually considered to be the province of literary writers. Novelists such as
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and poets such as Emily Dickinson and
Walt Whitman are well known for their distinctive literary styles. But
journalists, scientists, historians, and mathematicians also have distinctive
styles, and they need to know how to vary their styles to fit different
audiences. For example, the first-person narrative style of a popular magazine
like National Geographic is quite different from the objective, third-person
expository style of a research journal like Scientific American, even though
both are written for informational purposes.
Not
just right and wrong
Style
is not a matter of right and wrong but of what is appropriate for a particular
setting and audience. Consider the following two passages, which were written
by the same author on the same topic with the same main idea, yet have very
different styles:
“Experiments
show that Heliconius butterflies are less likely to ovipost on host plants that
possess eggs or egg-like structures. These egg mimics are an unambiguous
example of a plant trait evolved in response to a host-restricted group of
insect herbivores.”
“Heliconius
butterflies lay their eggs on Passiflora vines. In defense the vines seem to
have evolved fake eggs that make it look to the butterflies as if eggs have
already been laid on them.” (Example from Myers, G. (1992). Writing biology:
Texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press. p. 150.)
What
changed was the audience. The first passage was written for a professional
journal read by other biologists, so the style is authoritative and impersonal,
using technical terminology suited to a professional audience. The second
passage, written for a popular science magazine, uses a more dramatic style,
setting up a conflict between the butterflies and the vines, and using familiar
words to help readers from non-scientific backgrounds visualize the scientific
concept being described. Each style is appropriate for the particular audience.
Elements
of style
Many
elements of writing contribute to an author’s style, but three of the most
important are word choice, sentence fluency, and voice.
WORD
CHOICE
Good
writers are concise and precise, weeding out unnecessary words and choosing the
exact word to convey meaning. Precise words — active verbs, concrete nouns,
specific adjectives — help the reader visualize the sentence. Good writers use
adjectives sparingly and adverbs rarely, letting their nouns and verbs do the
work.
Good
writers also choose words that contribute to the flow of a sentence.
Polysyllabic words, alliteration, and consonance can be used to create
sentences that roll off the tongue. Onomatopoeia and short, staccato words can
be used to break up the rhythm of a sentence.
SENTENCE
FLUENCY
Sentence
fluency is the flow and rhythm of phrases and sentences. Good writers use a variety
of sentences with different lengths and rhythms to achieve different effects.
They use parallel structures within sentences and paragraphs to reflect
parallel ideas, but also know how to avoid monotony by varying their sentence
structures.
Good
writers also arrange their ideas within a sentence for greatest effect. They
avoid loose sentences, deleting extraneous words and rearranging their ideas
for effect. Many students initially write with a looser oral style, adding
words on to the end of a sentence in the order they come to mind. This rambling
style is often described as a “word dump” where everything in a student’s mind
is dumped onto the paper in no particular order. There is nothing wrong with a
word dump as a starting point: the advantage of writing over speaking is that
writers can return to their words, rethink them, and revise them for effect.
Tighter, more readable style results when writers choose their words carefully,
delete redundancies, make vague words more specific, and use subordinate
clauses and phrases to rearrange their ideas for the greatest effect.
VOICE
Because
voice is difficult to measure reliably, it is often left out of scoring
formulas for writing tests. Yet voice is an essential element of style that
reveals the writer’s personality. A writer’s voice can be impersonal or chatty,
authoritative or reflective, objective or passionate, serious or funny.
Teaching
style
READ-ALOUDS
The
best way to learn about style is to have them listen. Listening to
good writing read aloud will help students develop an ear for different styles.
The best writers have a distinctive style that readers can most appreciate when
they hear it aloud rather than reading it silently. As students develop their
ear for different styles, they can compare the styles of different authors in
the same genre, examine how writers change their styles for different
audiences, and consider which styles are most effective for different
audiences, genres, and contexts. Read-alouds of picturebooks, poetry, and plays
help students develop an ear for language that they can transfer to their
writing.
When
you read aloud , think of the reading as a performance.
Many an ear for language has been deadened by that dreaded classroom affliction
— round-robin reading. Reading aloud for an audience also
helps students become aware of the effect of word choice, sentence structure,
and voice on that audience.
MEMORIZATION
Although
memorizing and reciting poems, folktales, speeches, sermons, soliloquies, and
songs may seem archaic, memorization helps students internalize different
oratorical and poetic styles. Teaching students oratorical and storytelling
techniques can help them think about how words and sentence structures are used
for dramatic effect. Even memorizing a joke helps students think about style.
WRITING
IN DIFFERENT VOICES
Differences
in characters’ personalities — their styles — are often revealed through the words
they speak. Younger students can practice assuming different voices: angry,
sad, whiny, excited, scared, dreamy. What words would they use? What would the
words sound like? Would their sentences be long or short? Older students often
have difficulty moving away from a chatty, conversational voice to the more
authoritative voice of expository writing genres; practice with an emphasis on
voice will help.
FINDING
LIVELIER WORDS
Elementary
students should learn to use a thesaurus. Have them make word collections of
strong verbs, concrete nouns, and precise adjectives and adverbs. Ask them to
identify vague, generic words in their own writing and brainstorm livelier
alternatives.
Older
students can learn to envision themselves in the setting they are describing
and brainstorm words that concisely convey vital elements of that setting. As
Partricia O’Connor writes, “If you ride, think of a horse’s gait: walk, trot,
canter, gallop. If you’re musical, use your toe or an imaginary baton to mark
the tempo: adagio, andante, allegro, presto. Think of an oncoming train, the
waves of the sea, wheels on a cobblestone street.”
SENTENCE
COMBINING
One
of the most effective methods for developing sentence fluency is
sentence combining. In sentence combining activities, students combine short
sentences into fluid passages. Sentence combining helps students move away from
the short, choppy simple sentences of beginning writers toward longer, more
complex sentences. These activities can also help students learn to tighten up
their sentences and to rearrange them to achieve different effects. Strong
(2001) uses sentence-combining activities to study the stylistic choices that
professional writers make.
References:
Ray,
Katie Wood. (1999). Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary
Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Strong,
William. (2001). Coaching Writing: The Power of Guided Practice. Portsmouth,
N.H.: Heinemann.
Strunk,
William, and White, E. B. (2000). The Elements of Style (4th Edition). Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Zinsser,
William. (2001). On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction.
(6th edition). New York: Harper-Collins.
