Regardless of what genre or topic is being written, each writer expresses their own unique style through word choice, narrative structure, and their own voice. It’s a complex and emergent phenomenon, and something separates Hemingway from Steinbeck, Atwood from LeGuin, and Keats from Wordsworth.
Your Style: It’s What Makes You You
A lot of people underestimate the importance of their style and how it reflects on them. It’s the way they dress, how they put their hair up, and even what kind of shoes they wear. It’s the first thing that someone sees about you and is a huge factor in your ability to sell yourself and get hired.
There are two ways to define style. The first is a characteristic manner of expression or performance, which may be based on some particular art, period, work, or employment. The second is an attitude toward experimentation or change that distinguishes one society from another.
This can be a difficult subject to study, as it is hard to know whether to draw a conclusion about the habits or traditions of an entire society from a description of its style. There are, for example, conservative groups or societies that will tend to resist change in all fields and others that are very dynamic and receptive to experimentation.
The contrasting attitudes to change are often illustrated in architecture, as with the rejection of ornament in neoclassical buildings or the conspicuous simplicity of the Gothic revival. In other cases, a society may be in a stage of development where the prestige of new technology and engineering has stoked the desire for a more technological “functional” style, such as the iron-constructed buildings that were a favorite of American architects in the nineteenth century.
It is interesting to note that in Soviet Russia, where Hegelianism was the official creed, artistic deviation was bound to be interpreted as a social indicator of potential disloyalty. This meant that an artist had to be very careful to make a style appealing to the majority or else risk being accused of “destructive” artistic activity, and the Soviet Union adopted a strict, uncompromisingly monolithic style that was not easily changed.
You can develop your own personal style by focusing on your values and the things that mean most to you. It’s important to be able to define your own personality and what you want to accomplish in life, so that you can then build a style around that and be more confident about the way you present yourself.
Your Writing Style: It’s What Makes You Write
A writing style is a combination of elements that help an author convey their message in a way that is unique and memorable to their audience. Depending on the topic, authors have different approaches to word choice, sentence length, and punctuation usage. This can be a challenge to grasp, but it’s a crucial element to understanding how to create an engaging and effective work of literature.