Writing - Four Writing Styles

As you will be required to write more book reports, stories, poems and novellas, now would be a good time to revisit these four writing styles. Below is brief review of each style.

The Narrative Style: To narrate means to tell a story from your own viewpoint and your own perspective. For example: “I took dance lessons from the time I was three years old. In fact, I can remember a time that I didn’t want to become a professional dancer, although ballet was out simply due to my height.” The story is being told by the “first person, i.e., I.” In short, the writer has placed themselves within the story.

The Descriptive Style: When a writer uses great details in order to describe a person, place or thing, they use the descriptive style of writing. For example, let’s look at the following two sentences.

Thomas pushed the little dingy out into the lake.

Thomas, who was a ripe old age of 8, maneuvered the little dingy around from its perched position on the river bank and pushed it out onto the cold, morning lake. At this time of the morning the lake’s surface looked like an ice-blue pane of clear, perfect glass.

The first sentence is a basic, simple sentence. It does give the reader information but provides very little detail. On the other hand, the second sentence provides a great deal of description. It paints a much more vivid image for the reader to actually be able to visualize Thomas and know that he is a young boy. It also gives further description of the dingy, that being where it was located and its size. Finally, the author describes the look of the lake in the early morning. The writer of the second sentence is using the descriptive style of writing.

The Persuasive Style: In this style of writing the author is trying to persuade the readers to accept and embrace the author’s own views and opinions about what is being written about. This style can easily be seen in TV commercials such as product “A” has more meat in it than product “B” and because of that meat the value of product “A” is much greater than the value of product “B.” In a story, the author tries to persuade the reader to view things from a different perspective by first assuming that the reader’s opinions and viewpoints are different from the author’s. It is the author’s aim and goal to change the reader’s opinions and perspective to adopt the author’s own views and opinions.

The Expository Style: This style of writing is different from the persuasive style in that in this style of writing the author presents specific thoughts or ideas and then presents unbiased facts, figures and numbers about those ideas and thoughts without incorporating the author’s own opinions and views. Rather, the author allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. This style of writing is one of the more popular styles used and is found in many “How to” writings. Facts are given, such as instruction on how to build a tree-house, but how the reader uses those facts and interprets those instructions are solely chosen and decided by the reader.