WHAT IS A WRITING STYLE

by Joelle Steele

These days, there is a growing tendency for many writers to pass off their less than adequate writing skills under the guise of a writing "style." Well, I'm here to tell you that writing style is something entirely different than a lack of command over the English language. Having a style should never be confused with incorporating into your writing the elements of poor grammar, misspellings, lousy punctuation, or -- my very special pet peeve -- bad syntax.

So what exactly is a writing style? Simply put, it's the way you communicate within the basic structure of your language that distinguishes your writing from everyone else's. This means that there is a lot of room for developing a very unique style. Your personality can be portrayed in your writing to reflect your clever wit, angry discontent, insouciance, grave concern, activism, and any other number of character traits you happen to possess. You may also choose to pepper your writing with words or expressions that are uniquely yours or that reflect the local color of your dialect. You may write with a pronounced literary stance, dressing up your books or articles with a host of adjectives that are carefully selected to paint a vivid picture of whatever it is that you are trying to say. And if you are the academic or intellectual type, your works may be replete with words that rarely find their way into the vernacular.

Then we have slang or jargon, the specialized vocabulary of very informal words and expressions that come in and out of a popularity with equal rapidity, coloring our speech for short periods of time. Those too can be part of a writing style. Some writers make use of metaphor and simile with great skill. Some rely on a lot of famous quotes. Some flaunt a carefully crafted analogy throughout whatever they write. The list of things that characterize a writing style is virtually limitless.

The only thing that does not characterize a writing style is bad English. I cringe every time I get an editing project that is littered with dashes where there should be commas, commas where there should be semi-colons, run-on sentences, improper use of the ellipsis (those three little dots in a row), misused words and expressions, mixed metaphors, and the use of "that" when it should be "who," or "it's" when it should be "its." The list goes on and on ... and on. Add to those the plethora of syntactical errors -- the incorrect ordering of the words and expressions in a sentence -- and I just about want to S-C-R-E-A-M!

We're all at different skill levels when it comes to our writing and we each have our own special writing styles. But we are all the same when it comes to wanting our writing to be understood. After all, we are trying to communicate something to our readers. So as writers, we must all learn to use language properly as a courtesy to our readers, so that our messages comes across loud and clear with no room for misinterpretation. And in the process, we can demonstrate the uniqueness of our writing style by incorporating a variety of style traits into our language. In that way, our writing will be enhanced in whatever fashion best attracts readers to our words, and they will come to recognize each of us for our very distinctive writing styles.