Before I started this blog, an anon asked if I could address a dilemma they often struggle with: “Is this my personal style, or is this bad writing?”
Here’s the thing about your style: it can change. It will change. But change has to come from within.
When I teach college writing, my students often guard their “style” very closely. So if I say, “Using three adjectives for every noun makes your point hard to understand,” they react like I’ve said, “Your face is wrong, change it.” Their earlier schooling experiences might be responsible for this. Many teachers correct students without engaging them; they read against and not with them, never acknowledging what they’re trying to say. A kid says, “Here’s an idea I have,” and the teacher says, “Don’t use incomplete sentences.” A kid can really develop a complex after a few years of that. By saying, “Fuck you, my style is my style,” kids are just defending that little part of their selves that they expose in their writing and their teachers keep dismissing and correcting.
And you should always, always do that. Don’t let know-it-alls bully you into changing your style.
Bad experiences with writing bullies can make it hard to look at our styles critically when we finally decide we want to. At some point, we must reckon with the fact that most of us write to communicate. When a student says, “Well that’s just my style,” they’re saying, “I don’t care if people understand or enjoy it, my style is my style.” And yet eventually, if you’re writing to be read, you kinda have to care.
You don’t have to care at the expense of who you are, though. You don’t have to meekly absorb every critique and every list of “writing no-nos” that comes your way. If someone criticizes your style and you change it without knowing why, you’ve learned about as much as the student who rejects all the feedback they get. A truly helpful reader/writer exchange goes something like this: your reader says, “You know, you do this thing, and here’s how I responded to it,” and you look at your writing and go, “Oh yeah, I do do that, and your response was not the effect I was going for,” and so you change it. You’re not “correcting bad style,” you’re making an informed choice.
A good way to grow as a writer, besides writing, is to grow as a reader. To look closely at the way other people write and notice what they’re doing and how they do it. You’ll inevitably form opinions and preferences. And as you become more sensitive to the choices writers make, you might find that your own style doesn’t meet your standards anymore. That is when you should change your style: when it no longer matches your tastes as a reader.
But there’s also something to be said for experiments. Maybe you saw one of those “writing no-no” lists and learned that Stephen King thinks we should never use adverbs. Maybe he’s wrong—but what if you tried it? Write without using adverbs for a week and see how you like the results; notice how it changes not just the presence/absence of adverbs but the kinds of verbs you choose, the structure of your sentences, etc. Or maybe you’ve discovered a new writer and you’re obsessed. Try imitating them! Experiments like this aren’t permanent, and trying to sound like someone else can teach you a lot about the stylistic possibilities available to you.
If you have an overbearing or dogmatic writing teacher, you can survive their class by approaching their feedback in this spirit. If they say, “You must never begin a sentence with a conjunction,” they’re probably wrong, so don’t treat their feedback as a rule. But you might treat it as an experiment. Follow their rules and see if you like the writing you produce that way. If you don’t, throw the rules out as soon as the class ends. But if you do, you’ve gained something.
As a writer, you are free. You get to choose. To grow as a writer isn’t to internalize a set of rules—it’s to discover what choices you have.
