Don't Worry About Your "Writing Style."

The idea of “style” in writing and in speaking goes back thousands of years. In ancient Rome, style was one of the five elements of a successful speech, and a successful speech was essential if you were trying to persuade the governing body to do things your way. A good Roman orator paid attention to:

1. Invention (coming up with what he wants to say)

2. Arrangement (putting the material in a particular order so that it has the most impact on the audience)

3. Style (making sure that the language hits the right notes, that it has clarity, force and beauty)

4. Memory (recalling from memory what he wants to say, written notes were considered weak and ineffective)

5. Delivery (saying it in a way that captivates the audience)

These five elements are still with us. Actors must master them. So must every good stand-up comedian.

The preoccupation with “style” is, in some ways, a status marker. Most literate people want to sound as educated and as articulate as possible, both in speech and in writing. That is why style manuals emerged. In 1898, it was Hart’s Rules, which attempted to standardize spelling, usage, punctuation, and typography for publishers and writers. Reference works such as The Chicago Manual of Style and The Associated Press Stylebook greatly expanded on this concept. These references discuss details (such as usage, layout, and grammatical conventions) that books and magazines must take into account if they want high-quality production.

Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has sold millions of copies since its publication in 1959. It is aimed at a general audience, and it conveys basic rules of clear writing (such as avoiding the passive voice and limiting the use of the word “very.”) Elements of Style has been enormously influential.

Writing style itself has changed with the winds of fashion. Flowery prose, once the height of refinement, is now seen as dated. The Strunk & White approach to good writing is spartan and modern. It values clarity, brevity, and no unnecessary words.

One problem (or solution, depending on how you look at it) is that most of the traditional style rules (which really boil down to grammar and usage rules) can now be flagged not just by AI, but even by older non-AI spell-checkers. Are you over-using the words “really” or “actually” or “very”? No problem. My non-AI spellcheck has been flagging them for years, even when I know that one of those words belong where I put it. This is where the art of writing comes in. You can have your computer flag a split infinitive or the passive voice. But maybe splitting the infinitive is exactly what’s needed in that sentence. Maybe the passive voice works in that particular context. This is where deep experience as both a reader and a writer is essential. It’s the only way to develop the judgment to know when the computer is wrong. Sometimes the computer is wrong. Sometimes catastrophically so.

Some people will want to go farther, and have AI impart a particular style to their piece without having to do the work of figuring out how to achieve it without AI. I am averse to having AI do my composing for me, as I’ve discussed in this essay. If you’re the kind of “writer” who thinks you can take a shortcut to achieving “good style” using AI, this essay is not for you.

If, however, you want to create your own written works—especially works of fiction—and you are still worried about style, read on.

The Modern Concept of style

What is “style”? In modern times, “style” can mean a range of things, including the grammar and usage that Elements of Style and other reference works address. Mostly, I think that style boils down to the vibe of your writing, the kind of persona that your writing showcases. The word “persona” means something like the personality that comes through. For example, one writer might come across as a snobby and sarcastic academic. Another writer might come across as a blue-collar smart alec. Yet a third writer might project the persona of an air-headed influencer who only cares about pics and clicks.

The written persona is not the same thing as the writer’s personality and belief system. In satire accounts, the writer’s personality is not that of the satire character. The X account @TitaniaMcGrath, run by British comedian Andrew Doyle, is a great example of this. He writes in character, but he himself is not Titania. His beliefs are quite different from hers.

This is how acting works. Some actors can achieve a range of personas, and they come across as totally different people from role to role. Other actors have a much narrower range, and they end up playing the same character over and over again (which is fine if that’s what pays the bills). The same is true of writers.

Style in Fiction versus Non-Fiction

If you write nonfiction, don’t worry about having a range of personas. Learn to be an excellent writer, provide useful information that solves people’s problems, and don’t worry about style. Your persona will come through as a by-product of being a clear writer with solid information.

If you are a fiction writer, concern yourself with style only insofar as style furthers the power of your story. For some writers (such as Ayn Rand) the narrative style is going to be essentially the same across short stories and novels. She uses third-person narration in the majority of her fiction, and the style of that narration is consistent. The narrative tone of The Fountainhead is essentially the same as Atlas Shrugged. Both novels are powerful and unique, although the themes overlap.

For other writers, the narrative style might shift depending on what the writer is trying to accomplish. Here are three paragraphs from the opening pages of three different novels.

1. Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of creating any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts. But, as they say, money isn’t everything.

2. A Good Friday, sure. ’77, ’78, ’79? WS, stripling, in worn tight doublet, patched cloak, but gloves very new. Beardless, the down on his check gold in the sun, the hair auburn, the eyes a spaniel’s eyes. He kicked in youth’s peevishness at the turves of the Avon’s left bank, making with storing-up spaniel’s eye the spurgeoning of the back-eddy under the Clopton Bridge.

3. Beatrice-Joanna Foxe snuffled a bereaved mother’s grief as the little corpse, in its yellow plastic casket, was handed over to the two men from the Ministry of Agriculture (Phosphorus Reclamation Department). They were cheerful creatures, coal-faced and with shining dentures, and one of them sang a song which had recently become popular. Much burbled on the television by epicene willowy youths, it sounded incongruous coming from this virile West Indian deep bass throat. Macabre, too.

The author of all three is Anthony Burgess. The Clockwork Orange (the source of the first quote) is a dystopian novel about a young criminal, told in first-person, complete with a strange street-language that immerses the reader in that world. Nothing Like the Sun (the source of the second quote) is a biographical novel about William Shakespeare. Burgess uses antiquated words such as “spurgeoning” (gushing out) and “turves” (turf)—words that would’ve been familiar in Elizabethan England. The Wanting Seed (the third quote) is a dystopian novel about overpopulation in which women are discouraged from having children, homosexuality is heavily promoted, and cannibalism becomes common. Because The Wanting Seed is set in modern times (the novel was published in 1962), the vocabulary and syntax is familiar to modern readers. There is no special language as there is with Clockwork Orange, no antiquated words as one finds in Nothing Like the Sun.

If one had to classify Burgess’s writing style, what is it? There is no single answer. The style changes depending on the demands of the novel itself, as these examples show.

Fiction writing does not entail that you master diverse range of styles, as Burgess did. You can make a living by writing in a particular genre, in a particular voice. Louis L’Amour wrote westerns, and his style is consistent from story to story. He built a brand that is still going strong, and his books are steady bestsellers decades after his death.

One place where stylistic considerations would come into play is in the words, pronunciation, or syntax that a particular character might use. Often, this is icing on the cake, and it is not always necessary because physical descriptions of characters go a long way towards creating an image in the mind of the reader as to who that person is. Watching them take action in the story gives them even more individuality.

So, don’t worry about style per se. Read widely (especially books that were published before 1970), and focus on excellent writing. The style will take care of itself.