How To Juice Up Your Language Making a 3 into a 4, a 6 into a 7, or an 8 into a 9

It’s all about style. The writers we’ve read this year are distinct. They each have a voice. They each have an authorial style. That style is a result of authorial choices. Writers who are thinking about their craft choose how they’ll sound. Most student writing sounds like student writing. Its only choice is a lack of choice. Because the writer is indifferent, the writing sounds indifferent. And the reader is therefore indifferent, too. You are a writer. You have choices. You can sound better than you do. Style is more than decoration. It can clarify your meaning, amplify your point, enhance your message.

How Do We Develop More Style? Be concise. Destroy wasteful, empty phrases! Eliminate Take out words that don’t sound/feel like the others in your writing. Make kites of your sentences; give them loft and buoyancy with figurative language. Use parallel structure. Do it to balance ideas and to enhance elegance, to unify disparate parts or to contrast your ideas. Consider the harmony, efficacy, and beauty of the “rule of three.” Choose strong, precise verbs. It is a good idea to avoid “is” and “are” verbs. Active verbs transform sentences and vivify language. Bolster and invigorate your vocabulary with useful variants of words. If you don’t know how to use a word, then don’t use it! But if you can think of a more precise synonym, use it.

How Do We Develop More Style? When drafting your sentences, vary their types and lengths. Try short sentences. Even fragments, if they’re rhetorically compelling. Where appropriate, be confident and precise enough to use a balanced and grammatically correct longer sentence, especially if it helps clarify your meaning. Establish a tone through purposive word selection based on consciousness of connotations. Effective word choice is made on the basis of your purpose, your topic, and your audience. THINK about these things!

Do This Now. Write two paragraphs about love or about hooking up. Before you begin writing, think about and choose an audience, a purpose, and a definition or range for your topic. Skip lines as you write so that you can edit later.

Give It Some Juice. Throw away garbage words or phrases. Put a line through them and see how that alters your text. (E.g., why say “innumerable amounts of kisses” instead of just “innumerable kisses” or—better yet—“countless kisses”?) Eliminate buzzy adverbs and lame nouns that say little (e.g., kind, thing, really, very, awfully). Replace weak verbs with strong, precise verbs. Choose two or three sentences to put into parallel structure. Add parallel structure within another sentence. Find two opportunities to add alliteration. Find two opportunities to use the “rule of three.” Add 2 concrete uses of figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification) that evoke a specific feeling. Count the number of words in each sentence. Count how many sentences start with the same grammatical element (subject, prepositional phrase, etc.) Make strategic revisions so that from sentence to sentence, there is variation in length and style.