Asking students to add style to writing often yields underwhelming results. Even with mentor texts, students miss much. Here’s a surprising but interesting way to focus on eleven aspects of style.
- Give students a short mentor text. River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” work well: the 250 word limit makes them manageable, yet they usually illustrate various stylistic elements.
- Tell students they’ll share their work: a contest to see who can best keep ideas while removing style adds a fun competitive element and increases focus.
- Read the piece aloud.
- Using the exercise below, demonstrate each step, and then have students remove that aspect of style throughout the piece. Work individually or in pairs. Eleven steps; 1-3 minutes each.
- Have students share their de-stylized creations.
Students come away seeing how much comes from style, and aware of eleven ways to add style.
Exercise
Examples from “His Pockets” (Deborah Nedelman; River Teeth, “Beautiful Things,” June 8, 2015).
1. Replace vivid VERBS with more common, general verbs. To be, have, and go are appealing. Or omit good verbs:
2. Replace NOUNS with more generic equivalents:
3. Replace CATALOGS with classifiers that summarize:
4. Remove SENSES other than sight:
5. Convert FRESH/SURPRISING EXPRESSIONS to generic:
6. Convert DIALOGUE to indirect speech so we’re just told about what’s said:
7. Make SENTENCE LENGTH uniform; remove fragments:
8. Leave boring repetitions, but eliminate REPETITIONS/ECHOES that add style:
9. Remove repetitions of SOUNDS/CLASSES OF SOUND that create a poetic feel. A series of liquids (l/m/n/s) feels different from sharp (g/k/t) or popping (b/p) sounds:
10. Strip language that EVOKES FEELING. Especially avoid METAPHOR/ SIMILE/PERSONIFICATION; these often add emotional weight:
11. Read the piece aloud and remove RHYTHM. Rhythm isn’t just in how a good reader reads the piece, but in the actual stress patterns of the text.
Lots of ways to mess this up: add words, use words with extra syllables, etc.
Now that we’ve learned how to mess up style, we can also put it in by doing these steps in reverse.
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E. K. Taylor is the author of Using Folktales (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and editor of William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude (Herald Press, 2003). He writes, teaches, and holds an M.F.A. in writing from VCFA. Recent work has appeared in River Teeth, English Journal, Plough Quarterly, Caterpillar, and elsewhere.