Writing style is somewhat more complicated and subtle than the other fictional elements we've studied so far. The lecture is therefore longer and more detailed; please pay close attention to this page and the next.

Writing style consists of the way the writer puts sentences and paragraphs together, and several few aspects of content.

Listen to the audio lecture as you follow along below.

Writing style consists of:

• sentence type and length
• diction, or vocabulary
• amount of various writing techniques, especially
  • dialogue
  • description
  • sensory images
  • irony/sarcasm
  • repetition
  • humor
  • symbols

Look at just one paragraph each by two famous American writers: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. First, Faulkner:

They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father's stiff foot as it came down on the board with clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore and which was not dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening minimum not to be dwarfed by anything--the flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had once been black but which had now that friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies, the lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw . . .

Well, that isn't even the whole paragraph, but you can easily see the pattern: huge long sentences with lots of clauses, very formal diction that includes some unusual words, and lots of description. This is Faulkner at his most elaborate.

Now Hemingway:

In the evening he practiced on his clarinet, strolled down town, read, and went to bed. He was still a hero to his two young sisters. His mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had wanted it. She often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. His father was noncommittal.

Here we have short sentences with simple structures, simple language, no elaboration. Four of the five sentences start the same way. He gives the facts, very plainly.

Hemingway and Faulkner are extremes. I haven't included enough to tell, but if you've read their work, you also know that Faulkner used little dialogue and Hemingway used a lot (rarely telling us how characters said things, only what they said). Faulkner seems to want to get inside his characters and know all about them, telling us much of what they think; Hemingway seems to observe his characters from a distance, depending on their actions and what they say to imply what they think instead of stating it..

Continue to a few more examples of different writing styles on the next page.