Writing style

Writing style refers to the manner in which an author chooses to write to his or her readers. A style reveals both the writer's personality and voice, but it also shows how he or she perceives the audience. The choice of a conceptual writing style molds the overall character of the work. This occurs through changes in syntactical structure, parsing prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of thought into usable frameworks.

Styles

Business Style

Business style is very similar to technical style, except that longer sentences are acceptable. The phraseology is likely to be somewhat more subjective, with relatively more opinions rather than facts.

Conversational Style

Conversational style is identified by the use of personal pronouns, contractions and colloquialisms, and letters and other differences in vocabulary and grammar representing a different linguistic register.

Considerations

Situation and purpose

The author needs to decide whether the goal is to inform, persuade, or entertain, and will tailor the style to the situation and purpose. For example, a person writing a letter would use different styles for a letter of complaint and a letter of condolence. A letter of complaint would require a business style, while a letter of condolence would need a conversational tone.

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.