Style Analysis of Blog Writings

Style Analysis of Blog Writings

What is “style” in writing? After reading Strunk and White’s The elements of Style and Joseph William’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, I have come to understand what style is: I always thought of “style” as being your own, but through these books I learned that that’s not entirely true. “Style” is a mixture of many things and individualism only being one part, but for me the most important.

Style is a way of writing clear, cohesive, grammatically correct and true to one’s self. White says in the last chapter of Elements of Style “style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing.”(Strunk and White 66) Good writing is not that hard to achieve, any one can write well. If you write true to yourself it will make your writing better. Williams talks about “your voice” and so does Strunk and White. White says “All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities and their biases.” (Srunk and White 67) Williams says “Writing well, they believe, has to do with being sincere, or writing how they speak, or finding their authentic voices, or just being born with the knack. (Williams 1) Good writing lets us know something about the writer even if it is technical. To be interesting we need some insight into the person’s feelings and thoughts. Writing should be something we enjoy not something that we dread or fear. Most people, students especially, have come to hate writing because they don’t know the “rules” and are afraid to make mistakes. It seems that people are more concerned with correct grammar then content. It is important to have good grammar, punctuation, and spelling, but what you have to say is the most important. People spend so much time worrying about what their paper looks like, then what it sounds like. Sitting down to write a paper can be intimating and sometimes it is hard to organize our thoughts to put them down on paper. I feel that reading books like Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is helpful, but practice is the key to good writing.

I had never heard of Blooger.com until I was introduced to it by my English class. I found the blog entries to be a helpful assignment, because the best way to become a good writer is by practice.