5 Tips for Improving Your Writing Style
by Drew C.
As a concept, “style” can be hard to pin down. In writing, style is technically the result of diction (the words you choose) and syntax (the shape of your sentences). In essence, it’s how you express yourself on the page—how you come across. You can think of writing style in terms of fashion, since the process of choosing the right clothes to suit your personal taste is comparable in many ways.
So how do you improve your style? The most common answer you’ll hear is “read and learn to emulate the authors whose style you appreciate.” In the long-term, that’s the best advice. After all, we’re imitative creatures. Whether we’re putting together an outfit or a paragraph, we need models to inspire us and guide our intuition. In the short-term, though, here are 5 tips you can use to improve your writing style:
- Develop your “voice.” Voice is like personality—no two are exactly alike. It’s one of the most mysterious and subjective features of writing, but it’s something you can develop to your own satisfaction if you treat every first-person writing assignment in school as a chance to practice expressing your personality in writing.
- Learn to control your tone. If voice is like personality, tone is more like mood, in that it changes based on the situation. A really important writing skill is learning to control your tone. Often this happens in revision, when you smooth out the weird tonal shifts you introduced in the process of writing several drafts. To return to the fashion analogy, you want your outfit to “match.” Another useful post, ‘Capturing the Right Tone of Your College Essay’ helps elaborate on this point.
- Show your thought process. In math, you have to show your work, but you also have to get the answer right to receive full credit. Essays are different. The whole point is to show your mind in motion—your thought process, your emotional journey, the path you took to your present state of self-understanding. Whenever you can, practice trying to capture the movement of your mind. You want your essay to read like a thoughtful personal narrative, not a list of confident bullet points.
- Vary your sentence length. This creates a sense of rhythm—writing is music, after all— and gives readers a chance to pause. If every sentence in one of your paragraphs is the same length, it’s time to edit.
- Read your draft out loud. This might be the most practical tip I have when it comes to improving writing style. When you read out loud, you hear every awkward phrase, tonal shift, and puzzling ambiguity. You pick up on those pesky repetitions and redundancies. You can tell when a sentence is too long (that’s easy: it’s when you run out of breath). Get in the habit of reading aloud, and I promise you will improve your style.