What helps a writer have a writing style?

Style is personal, in writing and life in general. It should be as unique as our fingerprints or dental records. Still, we cannot deny that writing has evolved. And with it, so has people’s style of writing. 

“Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica,” the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences postulates, adding: “Of these three writing systems, therefore, only the earliest, the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, invented in Sumer, present-day Iraq, c. 3200 BC, can be traced without any discontinuity over a period of 10,000 years, from a prehistoric antecedent to the present-day alphabet.”

These days, people read with their eyes and their ears. This has surely turned style into something that will not only be enjoyed when found on the page, but can be heard with equal pleasure off it. 

Eye reading is “the traditional learning of letter identification and rhyming, and then learning how the individual sounds join to form words and those words form sentences and so on,” experts at the International Dyslexia Association, say. Ear reading, they add, “means reading using audiobooks or similar text-to-speech software. Rather than the written words being taken in through the eyes and processed in the brain, the verbal words are heard through the ears and then processed in the brain.”

Obama speaks

The two modes of reading leave markedly different impressions on different readers. For instance, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), a memoir by Barack Obama, is noticeably different when it is read and listened to. This is, thanks to Obama, voicing the audiobook himself. His mellifluous voice guides you along to how he wants you to see him. And he succeeds, very well. 

The hardcover version of Obama’s book, on the other hand, allows the imagination to kick in. Obama’s voice is heard with a voice in your head shaped by Obama’s words, which combine to lend your inner voice a multi-tone, thereby allowing your intellectual and emotional energy to colour the book’s words and give it emotional prosody (rhythm and intonation). In this sense, the phonetics touch up the feel of the book.

BookTok

We could even conflate eye-reading and ear-reading to refer to an audiovisual literary experience. This is what is being experienced on TikTok, a social media platform for creating, sharing and discovering short videos. On TikTok, there is BookTok, which—per Google—is “a sub-community on the app TikTok that focuses on books and literature. Creators make videos reviewing, discussing, and joking about the books they read. These books range in genre, but many creators tend to focus on young adult fiction, young adult fantasy, and romance.”

Of course, with all these new literary approaches, the styles by which words are conveyed to the reader undergo a radical conversion of the elements of style in writing. However, we cannot ignore the basic tenets of literary style. 

“It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules,” says William Strunk, Jr in his book The Elements of Style.

Thus, unless one is differently abled, one would do well to embark on the winding road of style with eye-reading, initially. 

This will give the reader the sights and sounds of the words, which can subconsciously be adopted to give the reader the writing tools to develop writing skills. 

According to Real Simple, a website committed to using high-quality, reputable sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts in their articles, there is another reason to read physical books. “The feel of paper pages under your fingertips provides your brain with some context, which can lead to a deeper understanding and better comprehension of the subject you're reading.”