My Style

There is a rather enigmatic saying that "talented people borrow, but geniuses steal." I didn’t quite understand that idea until I began my freelance editing career. My task (besides writing about how to write) was to analyze some of the finest stylists in the English language in order to create teaching tools that would help instructors in developing their lesson plans. To do so, I had to understand the architecture of good writing from the basics--what constituted a grammatically correct sentence--to the minutiae of tone, voice, syntax, affect, effect, and organization. By meticulously studying the styles of many great modern writers, I “internalized” them. I became a student, then a master of style: I learned from the best including George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Selzer, Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, Isak Dinesen, Tom Wolfe, and many others.

I learned what constituted a well-written phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, and book. You might not think such training would have helped me when I later worked as a policy analyst, which involved writing and presenting proposals and reports on social issues for state and federal agencies. But it did because I was able to read, analyze, and understand the particular “language” of whatever document I needed to compose. I reached a point where I could read an entire published book, and if there was one misused word—one that didn’t fit for one reason or another—it would be as obvious to me as a violin teacher hearing a student mangling a note in a concerto.

Eventually, written language became my friend and companion. I could use it to articulate what was on my mind, but I could also express in writing what was in the minds of others. I must have been on to something because when I was assigned to write grant proposals, 80% of my them were funded. Did I have a magic touch? Not at all. What I had was two things: the ability to find the right word, and the ability to fulfill the expectations of the reader. Just as a good actor can use his or her personality to develop a character, I found myself doing the same so as a writer.

What is style? Style is the particular way one presents oneself to the world. Think of style in fashion, communication style, or the expression "I like your style."

Everyone has one, but not everyone has developed a writing style. That’s where I can help you out. Whether it’s revising what you’ve written to help you sound more like you, or to start from scratch and create something that reflects your ideas and the way you’d say them if you could translate them onto the page. If you have trouble with this, I can help.

Most people learn from example. Here is an excellent example of "style" in writing. Two paragraphs expressing pretty much the same thing. But they are considerably different:

The first is from the King James Bible—a well-known passage from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The distinguished writer George Orwell—who abhorred pretentious style in writing re-wrote it like this:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Two paragraphs. More or less the same idea. Which of the two would keep you interested?

I thought so!