In Learning Space

As writers, we all have our own style of writing. There are four main types of writing styles: narrative, expository, persuasive and descriptive and sometimes you can even mix these in one piece

  • NARRATIVE

The main purpose of narrative writing is to tell a story. There is the use of characters, dialogue and events that happen to the characters. When the author writes as one of these characters, it is called the first-person narration. This type of writing is usually used in short stories, flash fiction, novels, poetry and autobiographies.

  • EXPOSITORY

This is a common writing style. Its main purpose is to explain. It focuses on explaining a specific concept without voicing the personal opinion of the author. It seeks to impact accepted facts and statistics. Expository writing is usually used in how-to books, textbooks, recipes, business, scientific or technical writing and news stories.

  • PERSUASIVE

Its main purpose is to convince the reader of a position or belief. Unlike expository, persuasive writing contains the author’s biases and opinions as well as justifications and reasons as evidence of the correctness of the author’s position. This one is used in reviews, argumentative essays, cover letters, letters of complaint, commercials, marketing pitches, editorial articles, advertisements, letters of recommendation.

  • DESCRIPTIVE

In this style, the author focuses on describing a character, event or setting for their readers. The author may employ similes, metaphors or any other literary devices. It can be poetic in nature when the author uses highly detailed descriptions. It targets the five senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and touch to convey the author’s impressions. It is often used in novels, memoirs, travel guides, journals and plays.

Read – The Art of Storytelling by Michael Oluwaseyi, Nigeria

And now to CONCLUDE:

As writers, we must also pay attention to things that may seem minor but still affect our writing style such as:

✍​Structure sentences – bad grammar and lack of punctuation make for bad style.

✍​Tone and mood – this should be determined by the scene type. Action scenes call for short, precise sentences while romantic scenes may call for long, poetic and descriptive sentences.

✍​Abrupt changes of tense – jumping between tenses is a bad style and leaves the reader confused.

✍​Word repetition – repeating the same word too much in a passage or sentence is a style killer.

✍​Diversify writing styles – as writers we have our own favourite styles but it’s critical to be familiar with all styles and to diversify so as to avoid being monotonous.

✍​Giving and receiving feedback – other authors can notice mistakes in your writing you might have missed. Giving critique on another writer’s work help you to notice errors in your own work.

✍​Editing – edit sentence structures, style, and plot instead of just editing grammar and typos.

✍​Audience – be conscious of your audience and write accordingly. If your target audiences are kids use simpler words e.g. the word ‘ambrosial’ can be substituted with ‘sweet’.

 

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Comments
  • Nyaruri Paul Okinyi
    Reply

    As a writer, I find this article informative. Most of the writers tend to assume some of these minor instructions thereby, ending in writing different piece of write up.

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