What is style?
Style refers to how someone expresses themselves in writing—in other words, what makes their writing sound like them. Just like how someone might choose clothes based on their mood, the weather, or the persona they’d like to convey, style allows writers to adopt a particular “aesthetic” tailored to their purpose, context, and personality.
The two main building blocks of style are diction and syntax:
A writer’s persona communicates to their audience who they are. It’s not only a chance to give writing a little personality, it is also an opportunity for writers to connect to readers by allowing them to imagine the person who wrote the text they’re now reading (or the character narrating that text). A writer’s persona doesn’t need to encompass every single aspect of who they are as a person—rather, it’s a way of presenting a coherent identity to their readers through their language.
Consider how writers already establish different personas in everyday writing activities like texting and posting on social media. The way that someone texts their friends about going out for a party is likely different than how they text their grandmother about Thanksgiving dinner plans. Similarly, different social media platforms allow people to curate different personas with carefully selected posts and reposts of texts, images, videos, and gifs. For example, someone’s private Facebook account might express a different personality than the public LinkedIn account they use for work. Similarly, writers choose what persona to craft based on their goals and audience.
Style is contextual, meaning that it is determined by the media of writing and publication, the author’s aims, and the intended audience. Using casual or simple language in a formal document would be inappropriate, for instance, because it might give the audience the impression that the author doesn’t fully understand the importance of the work, that they don’t take the audience seriously, or that they simply don’t have a very extensive vocabulary (which could affect their ethos, or credibility). Conversely, a social media post from a prominent political figure might demand a certain level of seriousness or decorum. When taking context into account, a writer needs to consider not only what they would like to say and how, but also what their audience needs and wants to get from the text.
Style allows writers to create mood and evoke feeling in readers. Mood refers to a writing’s atmosphere, and can be influenced by the writer’s attitude, or their tone. For example, Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and poetry often have a somber or eerie mood, whereas Jane Austen’s novels display her sense of wit.
Mood and tone work together to help create pathos, or emotions. As part of the rhetorical triangle, along with logos (logic) and ethos, pathos allows for genuine human connection and helps inform the audience’s attitudes and decisions. In fact, some treatises on Classical rhetoric, like Longinus’ On The Sublime, argue that pathos is the most important aspect of the rhetorical triangle for this reason. But no matter how one ranks the elements of the rhetorical triangle, the ability to evoke emotion in an audience is a hallmark of strong stylistic writing.
Using Models
One way to develop style as a writer is to read broadly and practice writing often. Make note of what you like and what you don’t. Analyze what makes that style work and try applying it in your own writing. You’ll find as you experiment that some styles sound like you, and some don’t, and that some styles work better in some situations than others. The important thing to remember is that writing is a craft. It takes practice and diligence, much like music, visual arts, and sports. Just as no one is born a concert pianist, but rather rises to that level of talent and prestige through training, so too is no one born a perfect writer.