Style

1. Who is your audience?

Diction: the words an author uses to convey ideas to the reader

Dead

• croaked
• deceased
• passed away
• expired
• offed
• kicked the bucket

Syntax: the arrangement of words to create sentences

“That night I sat on Tyan-yu’s bed and waited for him to touch me. But he didn’t. I was relieved.”



(The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan)

“They left me alone and I lay in bed and read the papers awhile, the news from the front, and the list of dead officers with their decorations and then reached down and brought up the bottle of Cinzano and held it straight up on my stomach, the cool glass against my stomach, and took little drinks making rings on my stomach from holding the bottle there between drinks, and watched it get dark outside over the roofs of the town.”



(A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway)

Original:
"No sich uh thing!" Tea Cake retorted. (Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes
Were Watching God. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978, p. 205.)

Informal:
"Nothing like that ever happened," Tea Cake replied.

Formal:
"With great fortune, that happenstance did not become a reality," Tea Cake stated.

Journalistic, after Ernest Hemingway:

"It did not happen," Tea Cake said.

Archaic, after Nathaniel Hawthorne:

"Verily, it was a circumstance, to be noted, that appeared not to so much
have been a reality as to have evolved as a thing that had not yet come to be," Tea Cake impelled.

Voice: the writer's presence on the page

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunty Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before."

Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at another's board and endure the lifelong chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireplace, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice. (9.16)

How to Build Voice

• always consider your audience
• let your personality come through in your writing
• don't worry about being "academic"
• use sentence structure to play with flow (a mix of long and short sentences)