17.5: Some Comments on "Style"

Style is a little mysterious. “You have a good writing style,” people may say to you, and we understand that to be a compliment, but hearing it may still come as a surprise to us: “I’m just doing what I do—there’s nothing special about it.” Your being not especially aware of your writing style might actually be a good thing, for reasons we will get into later. Still, though, we intend for these next few paragraphs and pages to encourage you to look closely at all those intangibles in your writing, the things other than grammar, spelling, and punctuation, in order to see what they might have to say to you about your style.

On the one hand, elements of our style feel as though they already exist in us in some innate form. They seem to emerge from us gradually via how we dress, how we move through or inhabit a space, and—most importantly for our purposes in this class—how we speak and write (not merely word choice, but the conscious and unconscious choices we make regarding accent, dialect, and slang and jargon that we may adopt). So, we seem to be born with a “style” that reveals itself over time, and we are usually not aware of it until something, or someone, calls our attention to it.

Yet, all of us, both consciously and semiconsciously, also cultivate elements of our style: we watch and listen to and read people whom we admire, respect, and even fear, and begin to do as they do (or, if we do not admire, respect, or fear them, we avoid doing what they do). So, these parts of our “style” are natural and expected parts of our ongoing socialization. All this, we understand. What makes style socially tricky (and mysterious to us personally) is how to find that sweet spot in which our style seems intrinsic to our sense of who we are. We want it to seem genuine rather than an affectation, even as other people recognize bits of themselves in our style and respond (we hope) approvingly.

The same is true of style in writing. Style often comes up in discussions of literary works, and with good reason: writers have stories to tell, of course, but just as important to writers is how they tell them—all those features of writing that range from sentence length to word choice that together add up to “style.” We learn to recognize, and perhaps even appreciate, what a writer like William Faulkner achieves with his novels’ daring experiments with chronology and long and complex, often dream-like sentences, what an Ernest Hemingway accomplishes with his staccato sentences and diction shaped by his years as a journalist, and what a Gertrude Stein can do with her hyper-precise phrasing and re-phrasing within single sentences that make it seem as though her language has become pixelated. We understand that each writer has chosen these styles and worked hard to achieve them, but what makes each of them effective is that they seem to us organic, natural, to the point that if we could have met them while they were alive, it would have been reasonable to anticipate that something about their physical manner embodies their literary style.

But good style in academic writing, you are probably thinking, is different from literary style(s), and you would be right. Still, we need to be precise in how to phrase that difference. William Faulkner was once asked what he would say to someone who had read a novel of his three times and still could not understand it, and he said, “I would tell them to read it a fourth time.” We might regard his response as arrogant, but we would also understand and respect it as being true to the basic artistic relationship between an artist’s work and its audience. The artist can reasonably ask the audience to put in some work, but it is still up to the audience to decide whether to put in that work—and, of course, whether that decision is worth the trouble.

In academic writing, however, writers need to be much more cognizant of their audiences’ needs and expectations: after all, when doing academic work, we do not often have much say in what we read. We academics, whether we are professors or students, are usually captive audiences, held by the requirements of the work required of us. Therefore, writers for academic audiences would do well to remember this. They should try to address their audiences’ needs and expectations as well as they possibly can. Audiences for academic writing prefer precise, concise language; they like well-developed ideas and their explanations; they very much appreciate knowing how you know or believe what you do when you show them your sources for information and/or your reasoning. This book’s previous chapters, the pages that follow in this one, and your Composition II textbook and class next semester: all contain advice on how to do those things effectively

Even so, the question for us in our roles as academic writers remains, “In all this working to meet audiences’ needs and expectations, where am I in that work?” That is not only a fair question, it is an important one. And it is here that we hope you remember our discussion, back at the very beginning of Chapter 1, about your essays’ potential to be modes of self-expression, that their real subject is not so much the topic you are writing on but, rather, what it is you know and think about that topic. If you keep that in mind as you begin to structure and then draft your paper, you can make space available for your voice to be heard through it.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, it certainly helps you to choose a topic that holds your attention both intellectually and emotionally, but that is only the beginning of what you can do to make your writing on it truly your own. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you begin that process: Can you see the potential for repeated sounds in a sentence to draw readers’ attention to the ideas in that sentence? Do you like word-play, wit, and cleverness (not just joke-telling)? Are you good with analogies, or with making connections between an idea and an example that is familiar with a general audience? Can you summon genuine emotion and even passion when discussing certain topics? Can you sound as though you have a command of a subject without coming across as condescending to your audience? All of these attributes (in moderation), your professors will assure you, are welcome sights in academic writing. They are signs that the person who wrote that paper is emotionally engaged in its composition. That person, we say, has a voice: a style.

Now that you have read this section, and when you have some time, consider making note of things you like about your writing, and those things you tend to do. Then, try to identify what works and what doesn’t in your writing, enhancing the things that do work. Your instructors would be happy to offer you some of their own observations about your writing, too.