Although the body of your work, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, is highly important, one detail that is often overlooked is style.
Although the body of your work, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, is highly important, one detail that is often overlooked is style. Your style is the way in which you, as a writer, choose to interact with your audience. Style reveals not only your personality, but your voice in your writing.
It is key to consider your situation and purpose when developing your style. What are you writing about? Who are you writing for? Answering these two questions are your first steps in style development. When writing an essay or an article, one may wish to stay within the technical styles of writing as those are viewed as formal and of proper etiquette.
If you are writing a fiction piece, you have much more to consider. You not only look at tone, sentences and words, but chapters and punctuation. Authors have very different ways of writing their chapters in novels. James Patterson, author of The Women’s Murder Club series and the Alex Cross series, writes his chapters in very short forms, ranging from one to five pages. Anyone who has read the Harry Potter series knows that the chapters there are much longer, anywhere between 15 and 30 pages.
Sentence structure is a bit more technical in a sense that variety is a necessity. You do not want a book that consists solely of long, drawn out sentences, but you also do not want short sentences. That is not saying that your book cannot be dominated by one of these. Ernest Hemingway was a revered author who was famous for his choice of short sentences.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay titled “How to Write with Style.” In his essay, he lists several ways to develop your style, but the one that most stood out to me was his fifth point: “Sound like yourself — the writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. … All varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful … I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
This is the most important piece of advice one can take when it comes to style. No matter what you’re writing, always be yourself. You will feel much more accomplished when you complete a work in your own voice rather than one that is written from a template.
Kirsten Saylor is a freshman studying English. Email her atks749113@ohio.edu.
