Constructing Style
What is Style?
J. Y. Gao
What is style? The global conversion to postmodernism in the past half century has made the term ever more elusive. Emphasis on subjectivity in interpretation and reception has increasingly stolen the creative power of the artist and bestowed it upon the audience. Thus, below, created in a fashion that may be overly enthusiastic and to the point, are two ways that allow you to find your own writing style – your own voice within the scrambling, chaotic cacophony of eager Set One students, poetic English teachers, and spontaneous Art teachers.
- Find what your passionate about (and know when to trigger your passion)
When was the last time you felt an emotion so intense that it made you shut off every other thought in your head? Were you laughing? Crying? Shouting? Punching the wall? Mentally describe this scene. Try recalling this whilst laying on your bed before you go to sleep. Often, the transitional moments between awake-ness and asleep-ness, a process where the external world slowly fades away, allows the natural self-editing of thoughts and emotions to die down. These self-editing mechanisms help you conform to the myriad of social conventions and expectations you experience during the day. Fortunately, these mechanisms control your emotions when they are inappropriate for the context, and are often experienced in the form of internal ‘voices’ that observe and discuss every thought that traverses your mind. During your twilight hours, when the cognitive processes of the brain start to slow, these voices dwindle down to one. One voice means less efficient, but more focused, computation of surrounding information. Netflix, books and Instagram reels easily engage the singular voice, and the external world becomes unnoticed. If you have tried completing Maths homework in the late hours of the night, you might have found that the questions were wrestled quickly, but with extraordinarily poor accuracy. Your focused attention – that singular voice – does not have the multiple inputs of the voices you experience during the day, which means crucial parts of the question, as well as important segments of working out, become completely ignored.
Unlike your struggles with numeracy though, creative processes, especially that of writing, often benefit from the reduced ‘noise’. The normal issues with the crafting process, such as not knowing where to start, what to write, and how to write it are all byproducts of indecision between an array of choices swimming in your head. These choices interact through comparison, which results in evaluating certain options above or below others. All giving their personal opinions, these voices create a self-editing effect, and often prevents a singular flow of thought that can be materialised into writing efficiently. Conversely, the focused voice before bed does not. If you find the emotional trigger and extrapolate from it the things that you value most, that one voice will flow onto the page without stoppage, and will be riddled with emotive resonance and personal style.
Ironically, these sentences are not being crafted with such ease. I’m not in bed, and it’s 8:50 in the morning. Situations like these, where you are required to creatively produce during class and time-stress environments, are frequent at Shore and require more than just a reliance on intuition and the natural flow of a tired (but passionate) internal voice.
- Note down your favourite words and phrases
At some point during your time on the internet, you might have come across comedians demonstrating their ability to slip into any accent they want, often for comedic effect. The demonstration involves an explanation of a key phrase or a key word they use to get the voice of the accent in their head. You can do a similar thing with writing. Certain phrases and words are very unique to a certain style of writing/tone of voice, and may be very personal to your experience. For example, through watching some of Stephen Fry’s talks, I have found that replaying the way he says ‘extraordinary’ skews my internal voices towards the sort of British, upper class voice that uses complex, dense sentences with plenty of ‘which’ and ‘having been’ phrases, to deliver an extraordinarily powerful emotive expression. The pair of words, ‘perhaps’ and ‘indeed’, used at the start of a phrase creates a less clear voice that sounds closer to the ramblings of an Oxford professor. If I’m aiming for something more acerbic, I replay Jordan Peterson’s, ‘by any stretch of the imagination’; a critique loaded with political motivation is thus generated.
Some other times, beautifully written metaphors, like the one published twice in the SWR, ‘traverse across the canvas of the heart’, is ripped apart and stuffed back into imaginative pieces and discursive contemplations. When writing essays, appropriate chunks of analysis directly from publications like the Harvard University Press (accessible on jstor through Shore email); clear analysis that is packed with conceptual nuance is sure to differentiate you from the rest of your English class. A list of commonly used essay verbs like, ‘accentuates, delineates, elicits, elucidates, epitomises, evokes, imbricates, provokes, reifies, critiques, lambastes, promulgates, polemicists, frames, employs, advocates’ are a sure way to keep the flow going under high pressure exam conditions (source of words: Fitty). Choose your favourites and perfect your use of them (of course, never overuse).
Try these two methods during the week and see if you can recognise any patterns in sentence structure or word choice that you can capitalise on. Before you know it, you will have consolidated your personal writing style. From there, a world of possibility awaits as you discover ways to deconstruct the writing style of novels and academic essays and incorporate them into the existing and defined structure of your own voice.