What is a Writing Style?

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What's covered in this post

• What is a Writing Style?
• The 4 Elements of Style
• 4 Factors that affect Style
• Exercise 1: Sentence length and complexity

What is writing style?

Here’s a freeing thought: a Writing Style has nothing to do with grammatical correctness. In fact, a Writing Style is made up of all an author's tweaks and grammatical “errors.” It is their unique yet intentional way of using language to convey personality (voice) and tone.
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This is because Writing Style has more to do with rhetoric than grammar. Rhetoric is how an author uses diction, sentence structure, punctuation, and sentence and paragraph arrangement to convey emotion, evoke empathy, form a logical path of thought, and create narrators and characters that readers will trust.

The 4 Elements of Style

While an author’s style may vary from project to project, it will remain consistent and recognizable overall. An author creates their writing style through the following elements:

(1) Sentence length and complexity is the most basic aspect of style, in that it is the most recognizable. When you open a book or look at your writing, you can tell at a glance whether you use shorter or longer sentences, and simple or more complex sentences. The punctuation gives it away. More commas, dashes, parentheses, and semicolons are an indication you use longer, more complex sentences. You'll see a lot of ending punctuation marks (periods, exclamation points, question marks) if you use shorter, more simple sentences. You're going to have a variety of both, but you will notice that you're more likely to use a complex over a simple sentence.​

(2) Sentence patterns and arrangement differ from sentence length and complexity because sentence patterns deal more with what kind of nouns, verbs, phrases, and clauses you use. We'll be looking at the four basic sentence patterns next week.

(3) Word choice focuses not only on the connotation and denotation but also on the word size and how you create compounds.​

(4) Favorite figures of speech (schemes and tropes) are how you add embellishment and decorate your prose, although that is not their sole function. Schemes involve the transference of word order, and tropes involve the transference of meaning. We'll be discussing the different types of schemes and tropes later in this series, but some examples of schemes include polysyndeton (many conjunctions), parallelism, and elision. Some examples of tropes are: metaphor, puns, and personification.

4 Factors that affect Style

While the above four elements remain consistent overall and therefore recognizable, your Writing Style varies from project to project through the following four factors: 

• Narrative distance is how close to the subject or character’s internal, emotional life your narrator is. How you create your narrative distance or closeness is created through point-of-view, free indirect discourse, and character/narrator observation.

• Genre factors into stylistic choices of tone, word choice, use of contractions, and even the length of your sentences. For example: with historical fantasy, you may choose not to use contractions to make your tone more formal, while it would look odd to not use contractions in urban fantasy. You will also use different forms of slang when writing Regency romance than writing contemporary romance.

• Purpose changes how you arrange sentences and paragraphs. If your purpose is to write an argument, you may use stronger language, more exclamation marks and em dashes, and shorter paragraphs to convey that tension.

• Intended audience may change sentence length, complexity, word choice, and choice of figures of speech due to the age and knowledge of your audience. A children’s fantasy book reads differently than an adult fantasy book. There may be more humor, shorter sentences, and simpler word choice in a children’s fantasy, so that it’s easily understood and enjoyable for that age group. 

Exercise 1: Sentence length and complexity

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