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How to Develop Your Own Writing Style

If you have ever wondered how to develop a unique writing style, you’re not alone. It makes complete sense to hope that your creative writing sounds different from everything else that’s out there. You want to be recognised for the way you write. I know I feel the same!

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a unique style that no one else could copy perfectly? Or, if they try to copy it, they’re making a statement! They’re using intertextuality to give you a wink and a nod! I know that’s my dream as a writer!

But we often fret about it way too much. We dedicate a big chunk of our time to trying to find unique ways of saying everything in our work. I know I’ve sat there, trying to rewrite the same sentence over and over before. Eventually, it becomes too much. It consumes us and drives the fun out of writing.

Don’t let that be the reason why you give up!

There are ways that you can sound unique without thinking about it too much. It just takes some time, dedication and a lot of experimentation.

Try out the tips below to help you develop a writing style that sticks!

Realise that you already have your own writing style

We all have our own unique ways of writing. While you might be inspired and influenced by your friends, family, teachers and favourite writers, you won’t say things in exactly the same way as someone else.

I mean, think about when someone else sends a DM through your friend’s account. 9 times out of 10, you can guess when it’s not them. Or, at the very least, you might think that they’re not acting like themselves.

That’s because we have our own idiolects. You’re going to be subconsciously influenced by lots of things going on around you. For example:

  • Age and generation
  • Geographical location
  • Socioeconomic status (class)
  • Other languages you speak
  • Hobbies
  • Interests
  • Texts (books, films, etc) you consume
  • People you talk to
  • Your choice of social media
  • Your personality

Of course, you probably share many of those things with the people around you. I mean, you’re in the same age group as the other people in your class, for example.

But at the same time, you’re not going to have the same exact blend as someone else. Even if you have an identical twin, you probably have different hobbies and interests. You might have seen a different film or read a different book.

And if you have any friends who are twins, you’ll know they definitely don’t have the same personality!

So, when you develop a writing style, you aren’t starting from scratch. You’ve just got to realise that you already have a whole idiolect at your disposal! You already write and talk slightly differently from the people around you.

Once you know that, you can start to refine what’s already there. You can make conscious choices to change what you see, and fit it to your writing.

Stop trying to make your writing style too different

It’s really tempting to focus hard on sounding different to everyone else around you.

But now you know that you already have your own individual way of talking and writing. So, you can understand that you don’t have to try so hard!

In fact, trying hard is actually one of the things that can really hurt your writing style. It can make everything you write sound forced or awkward. It won’t sound like the real, authentic you.

Unless you’re writing a character like Yoda, you probably don’t want to sound like you’re pretending to be human, or like you’re from a different planet. So, forcing a unique way of writing isn’t going to do you any favours.

When you make a story, being different should never be your main focus. You should care more about how you want people to react to it! So, you should focus on the plot, characters, settings, messages and reader reactions.

If you make ‘being different’ your main priority, you’ll let those things suffer. Eventually, there will be a time when you’ll have to choose between telling a good story and reinventing the wheel. In fact, there will probably be hundreds of those times in a single book!

Choosing your story over individuality will always make you a better writer.

Plus, it’s not easy to maintain an artificial writing style. It’s like faking a personality! Eventually, you’ll slip into your old habits, anyway! Or, you’ll have random slip-ups that make your writing sound odd and inconsistent.

It might sound counterintuitive, but stop focusing so hard on your writing style. Just write your story. Then, as I said before, you can always refine your words in the second draft!

No writing style can ever be 100% unique, anyway.

Understand that your writing style will change and develop over time

Our idiolects don’t stay static, either. They change over time. This happens for many reasons.

First, we grow and evolve as we have new experiences. A life event or experience like moving houses or a breakup changes subtle things about who we are. That changes things like our likes, dislikes, priorities, worldviews, fears, and much more. Sometimes, it’s not subtle at all. Some massive events change huge parts of our personality.

We also change based our roles and jobs. For example, I’m not the same person as I was when I started uni. Now, I have a full-time job at a school. Because I regularly have to think like a teacher, I write more like one, too.

And, of course, our friendship groups change over time. Best friends change. We lose contact with people when we don’t have much in common with them anymore. We make new friends from new places. And even friends who do stick around for decades change. They go through the same evolution that we do. And we adapt the way we speak to these social changes.

All of this changes how we write.

In fact, change is so normal that our writing style shifts throughout a single draft of a story! That’s why we need to proofread and edit – so we stay consistent.

If you know that this happens, you can harness it for your own benefit. You’ll know that no reader expects your writing style to stay exactly the same across a whole book series, for example. So, you can make your changes of writing style match the growth and change of the characters in your book. Your readers will appreciate that. It shows that you and your characters are growing and evolving, just like they are.

So, write regularly

Like all things in life, writing is a skill that you develop over time. Natural talent will only take you so far – especially when it comes to trying to develop your own writing style.

The more you write, the more you grow and improve. It means you get to try new styles and figure out what works best for you. Plus, you get the much-needed practice that you need to become a better and faster writer.

Personally, I’ve made a writing journal. It’s a bit like a sketchbook: a place for you to jot down little snippets of creativity when they hit you. I try to create some sort of short story or descriptive piece in it at least once a week. It helps to keep my writing muscles nice and strong. Plus, I have a record of how my writing style grows and changes over time.

Most of the stuff in a writing journal is going to be bad. That’s fine, though! No one expects you to be on Shakespeare’s level when you first put pen to paper. I don’t expect to be as good as him even after I’ve written 1000 stories! In fact, even Shakespeare flopped from time to time!

But the more you write, the more good stuff you’ll make. The bad stuff has its purpose, too! Comparing good to bad can help you to figure out what you like about your writing style. It helps you to assess what works and what needs to be refined.

Just make sure you look back over your old stuff from time to time. It’s not only about seeing how far you’ve come. It’s about taking lessons and inspiration from your past self.

Consume media by different writers with different styles

There’s no such thing as a writing style that’s 100% original.

While we are born with the ability to learn language and pick up grammar pretty quickly, we aren’t born with our mother tongue downloaded into our brains. Language learning is social: we observe and copy people, analyse their reactions to words and phrases, and get corrected by them.

It’s impossible not to be influenced by other people’s language. We literally learn from them. Plus, we need to share enough language to be understood by one another. There have to be more similarities in language styles than differences.

So, idiolects are subtle. We form through our experiences: people we speak to, books we read, films we watch, and much more. They’re like a linguistic collage: little snippets of language from your whole life stuck together. What makes an idiolect unique is where those influences came from and what you take from them.

But if you don’t have many outside influences, your idiolect won’t sound unique. If you’re only surrounded by a small number of writing or speaking styles, you’re going to sound quite similar to them. The more you expose yourself to, the more unique your style becomes.

So, if you constantly read the work of one writer, your writing style is going to be heavily influenced by theirs. That’s going to make it very hard for you to naturally develop your own style over time.

This is a big problem with writers who only read texts in their genre. Eventually, it all sounds the same, and they aren’t original anymore.

So, read lots of different texts by lots of different text producers. Read outside your genre. Try texts from different places and times. That way, you get lots of different subconscious inspirations for your writing style.

Analyse the styles of your favourite and least favourite writers

You don’t have to just read other people’s writing passively, hoping your writing style develops. You can take an active role by purposefully analysing other text producers’ work for inspiration.

It’s a good idea to use your English class analysis skills to pick apart what works for other writers. Then, figure out how you can use that in your own stories. Or, see what you don’t like about other texts and how to avoid it in the future.

Almost all great writers study other texts to understand why writers react the way they do. They assess whether they like or dislike the text. Then, they analyse it to see what causes these reactions. They can use that information to improve and refine their own writing styles.

Here’s a guide to analysing for writing style:

  1. Identify the reader reaction

    How does the text make you feel? Do you like or dislike the way it’s written? How does it make you feel? What does it make you think? If you can, ask people who fit the ideal reader for your story how they react to the text.

  2. Consider if it works or not.

    Do you think the writer’s style works well? Does it achieve the writer’s goals well? Did your reaction work well? Do you think there is something they could have done better?

  3. Analyse with the reaction in mind.

    Look over the text’s language and structure. What is it about those things that caused your reaction?

  4. Consider your own writing.

    Would those methods work for your story’s genre, tone, plot and message? How could you adapt it to fit better?

Then, you can try it in your own writing style! Of course, it’s going to take lots of editing and practice to get right!

Learn grammar rules and conventions

If you want to communicate well, you need to understand grammar. It’s a meaning-making toolkit!

If grammar didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to communicate complex ideas or influence other people’s thoughts and feelings. So, the more you know about it, the more you can use it to develop your own unique writing style.

That’s because you’ll be able to spot which language patterns make people think and feel specific things. Learning the conventions gives you the knowledge and language to talk about what works and what doesn’t. That takes guessing out of the equation!

Plus, the more you know about the rules and conventions of grammar, the easier it will be for you to break them.

It will be easier for you to subvert grammar conventions because you’ll be able to consider the following questions:

  • How would I say the thing I’m trying to say using conventional grammar?
  • What meaning, thought, feeling or idea does this conventional grammatical structure communicate?
  • What meaning, thought, feeling or idea do I actually want to communicate to the reader, and how is it different from the standard one?
  • How can I subvert the grammatical conventions to communicate this to the text receiver?
  • Will my new, foregrounded language still make sense to my text receiver?
  • What is it about this new, foregrounded language that gives the reader my intended meaning, thought, feeling or idea?
  • Why is this foregrounded language better than the conventional way of talking?

These questions make your writing style more authentic. They’ll help you to break away from being different for the sake of being different. Instead, you’ll have a reason and a logic behind the way you write. That makes a huge difference to the quality of your writing.

Experiment with different writing styles and methods

All the best writers experiment. They try out new genres, narrator types, points of view and language styles to see what works best for them. No one can pull out a perfect draft of a story the first time around! You need to fail at different things before you can succeed.

Even if you think you haven’t experimented with your writing, I can promise that you have. You definitely did as a kid! Remember those classes where your teacher asked you to write a short story? They might have marked it – or asked you to explain why you chose a particular literary device. That was experimentation.

Now, you just need to learn how to do that on your own.

Experimenting gives you to try out different methods and devices. You can work out if the techniques work well for you and your story and tweak things that aren’t quite right. That will allow you to make an informed decision about whether you want to include something in your writing style. Then, all you need to do is practice the technique until it becomes second nature for you!

This is something I did when I decided to move from a third-person omniscient to a third-person close narrative perspective. I wrote lots of little snippets of narrative in the new perspective, trying out different things to see what worked for me. I could see first-hand what I was good at and what I needed to improve on.

That’s why I think it’s useful to have a writing journal. It means you have a place where you can record all your experiments. You can come back to the ones that worked and reflect on the ones that didn’t. It’s a huge help!

Avoid stale similes and metaphors

One of the things that makes every other mediocre writer sound the same is their overuse of the same figurative language. ‘I ran as fast as a cheetah’? ‘It’s as black as night’? We’ve all heard that 1000 times before! I want something new! Something fresh!

When we overuse figurative language, it loses its metaphorical power.

What do I mean by that? Well, let’s think of the common idiom, ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’. When you first heard it as a kid, it might have made you laugh. You probably thought of cats and dogs actually falling out of the sky and asked why we even use that saying in the first place. In fact, that’s what we’re supposed to do with metaphors. They’re supposed to get us to think about their implications.

But now that you’re older, you probably don’t think too hard about it anymore. You hear the idiom and your brain shortcuts to ‘it’s raining really hard’. You no longer imagine a cute little puppy falling into your arms like I used to.

For the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, the process where our brains stop thinking about the metaphors is called ‘habitualisation’ or ‘automatisation’. He said this:

‘Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life’

Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, (1917)

In turn, Shklovsky suggested defamiliarisation: describing familiar things in new and unusual ways to make your text receiver reconsider them or, in his words, ‘make the stone stony’.

Using old, stale figurative language will make you sound like every other person who used the same metaphor. But if you create new metaphors from your own unique perspective and worldview, that’s going to go a long way towards making your writing style sound individual and authentic.

Consider what writing style works for your audience and purpose

A good writing style is catered to a specific audience and purpose. There is not a single style that works universally! Imagine trying to write a children’s book in the style of Stephen King or an educational book for adults in the style of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It just wouldn’t work!

You need to think deeply about the audience of your text. And no, there is no such thing as a text for everyone. We create implied readers in our texts whether we realise it or not. So, it’s better to be able to think about what that reader is. That way, you can cater your style choices to them.

For example, children need simpler language than adults. If you wrote in the same way for both, the adults would feel patronised, or the kids would be confused.

The same is true for purpose. The language and devices in a persuasive text will be different from those in an educational or entertainment text. Then, there are the deeper purposes: a text created to convince you to donate to a cancer research charity will use different methods than a text created to educate you about solar panels.

In fact, it’s even subtler than that! A persuasive text about an animal charity will use different methods than one about a beach cleanup organisation. And audience and purpose intersect, too. A text created to make people laugh in the UK will use different methods from those in the US.

The more you think about your audience and purpose, the more unique your writing style will be. There is a near-infinite combination of audiences and purposes. So, you’ll be able to develop something different from the norm. It’s much better than creating generic text ‘for everyone’.

Use your text’s content to decide your writing style

As well as audience and purpose, you should cater your style to what you’re writing about.

Your text’s content should make a lot of style decisions for you. By ‘content’, I mean things like:

  • Plot
  • Tone
  • Atmosphere
  • Themes
  • Messages

Think about what happens in your story. Do you want it to be dark with lots of death? Or do you want it to be light-hearted and comedic? Any good writer will allow content decisions to impact the way they write.

For example, if your story is about characters who go through emotional turmoil, the language will focus more on their internal thoughts and feelings. That might be reflected in the verbs – you could use more verbs to describe thoughts than those that express actions. In contrast, a story with a funny plot might use more verbs of action to describe the funny hijinks that the characters get into. That has a huge impact on the writing style.

The same is true for the setting and theme, too. If the setting is creepy or you want to explore the theme of fear, you could incorporate Freud’s theory of the Uncanny into your writing to reflect that.

The more your writing style matches your story’s content, the more you’ll create a sense of cohesion. That will make your writing style feel authentic, which your reader will appreciate!

Of course, most of us do this subconsciously. It’s common for new writers to not even think about it. However, if you want to develop a solid writing style, you should sit down and write some notes about the content of your work. That way, you can keep it in mind when you’re writing. It will mean every choice you make will be focused, enhancing your writing.

Consider the importance of genre

Your story’s genre and content are connected. For example, if the plot and setting are scary, you’re probably writing a horror. However, there are a few nuances that you need to know about.

First, the word ‘genre’ can mean two different things. The first one is about literary or fiction genres and is probably the one you’re most familiar with. It’s when you classify stories into categories based on the content and style. It covers categories like ‘sci-fi’ and ‘horror’.

The second is about the textual genre or form. It’s about what type of text you’re writing and covers categories such as ‘autobiography’, ‘article’ and ‘novel’.

Also, categories of literary genre aren’t rigid. A scary story with a creepy atmosphere could be a dystopia or thriller rather than a horror. People can disagree about a story’s genre – like they do with Star Wars. Genres can change in a single story, too. For example, 10 Cloverfield Lane is mostly a psychological thriller/horror. But the name and ending suggest that this psychological narrative is inside a sci-fi.

So there’s a lot of baggage attached to the word. All of this has an impact on your writing style.

When you choose to write in a particular genre, you’ll choose which genre conventions you want to stick to and which you’ll subvert. This applies to both definitions of the word! Many of the conventions are about language, structure and form – in other words, your writing style. The decisions you make should suit your story and set you apart from other writers in the genre.

And you don’t have to create a story that fits rigidly into one genre. You can make one that people disagree over – or it could blend elements from loads of genres! That will make your writing more unique.

Let your narrator’s identity blend with your writing style

Your narrator is your biggest strength for developing a unique writing style.

It doesn’t matter if your story’s in the first or third person. The narrator is a character you created to tell the story in the way you want. Even if you’re the narrator, you’re still creating a character. You still choose what parts of your personality and identity you want to highlight and downplay.

There’s no such thing as an objective text. Everything in the world is biased. Your narrator character will have their own views on the events in the story, which will be based on things like:

  • Personal and political views.
  • Background, culture and mindset.
  • Their emotional connection to the story’s events and characters.
  • When they’re telling the story – do they have hindsight, or are they telling it immediately?
  • How the story has affected them.
  • Who they like and dislike.
  • Why they’re telling the story.
  • What they want us to think and feel about the story and its characters.

So, while you might not be writing an unreliable narrator, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a bias at all. It’s like a trustworthy newspaper: they’ll report the facts truthfully, but they’ll do it through their political bias.

Our feelings in the moment affect how we describe the world around us. If you’re angry, you’ll notice the things that upset you the most. If you’re happy, you’d describe the same scene in a happier way. The same is true for your narrator.

This is true even for a third-person omniscient narrator. They might seem objective, but their biases still seep in. It’s just more subtle.

Once you know this, you can be conscious about how the narrator describes the story. You’ll create an interesting narrator who shapes your writing style in interesting ways.

Incorporate your other strengths and expertise

We all have things we’re good at. We have unique blends of the things we know, jobs we do and areas of specialism. It’s useful when developing a writing style.

That’s because each job or skill makes us look at the world in a specific way. If you study law at uni, you train for three years to think like a lawyer. So, you’ll notice and focus on different things than a doctor or an English teacher. And because our studies and jobs make up a big part of our lives, we default to seeing the world in the way they require even when we’re not on the clock.

Episode 97 of One Piece has an example I love. Luffy runs off into the desert by himself. The group waits for him for ages. They all worry about him – and show it differently. Nami, the navigator, comments on his sense of direction. Vivi, a local, muses that there’s a lot he doesn’t know about the desert. Sanji, the cook, wonders if he’s hungry.

Sure, this is about characters, but it works for writers, too. When you write, you draw on knowledge and skills from other areas to give you something to write about. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have much to say! So, why not play to those strengths?

For example, I love to watch films and TV shows. So, I spent a lot of time analysing visual storytelling, which is reflected in my writing. The scenes are very descriptive, and I use a lot of visual symbolism.

You can do the same. Think about other things that you’re good at – hobbies, jobs, things you know a lot about. That can inform your writing style if you let it! Just be conscious about how you can include it in your writing.

Take inspiration from other languages and cultures

People with access to more than one language or culture have so many advantages in life. Growing an individual writing style is one more to add to the list!

It can enhance your narrative voice in many ways:

  • English takes loanwords from dozens of other languages. So, the languages you know will impact your vocabulary!
  • Different English-speaking cultures use the language differently. They have unique dialects and lexicons. Combining more than one culture will give your idiolect an individual flavour.
  • The grammar rules in other languages are different from English. That helps you consider how grammar influences storytelling – like how word order impacts suspense!
  • Languages and cultures have unique idioms and legends which can elevate your voice
  • Different languages make us think about the world in different ways, which makes us feel like we have a different personality in each! You can decide how much of each personality influences your writing.
  • Learning languages strengthens your understanding of grammar.

I think everyone should try to learn a language. It helps with so many aspects of life: writing, careers, making friends, and much more!

When you only know one language or culture, you can get bogged down by the same story conventions. You don’t get inspiration from lots of different places. So, your writing starts to look like every other person in the same boat as you.

I mean, look at the fantasy genre! Up until recently, many English-speaking writers came from the same handful of countries and read the same books. So, we got the same old medieval fantasy tropes based on the same fake version of Europe – evil orcs, distant elves and all!

But there’s so much you can do with the genre if you branch out. Immersing yourself in different cultures and languages helps with that!

Create a bank of words that you like to use

Every writer has words they love to return to. It’s like their signature! You can learn a lot about a writer, writing style or novel from the most-used words, phrases and punctuation.

In fact, our word banks are so unique to us that there’s a whole profession called ‘Forensic Linguistics‘. It’s where you analyse language to help catch criminals – including the Unabomber. People have even used these methods to discover famous authors who have secretly published under pseudonyms. I won’t comment on the irony of how methods to catch criminals were used on a certain author.

We can identify people by their language because some words come more naturally to us, while others don’t.

Let’s take George R.R. Martin as an example. He often uses the adjective ‘leal’ and the verb phrase ‘break his fast’ in A Song of Ice and Fire. These are quite archaic, so it gives us a sense of the world he’s building and the narrative voice he’s using.

When I studied my own writing, I noticed patterns, too. Many of the words in my lexicon are sarcastic, like ‘wonderful’ and ‘fantastic’. Plus, I use more verbs of action than verbs of thought – that makes sense based on what I said earlier about my love of visual storytelling!

You should analyse your own most-used words! Upload your writing to a piece of corpus linguistic software like AntConc. Give it time to analyse your work. Then, once you’ve got the most-used words, you can ask yourself, ‘Do these match my ideal writing style and story?’.

In the future, you can adapt your word bank to match your intentions. Work out what words and phrases suit your ideal style and story the most. Make a list. Then, keep referring back to it as you write.

Consider what parts of your personality and identity you want to emphasise

As I said before, even if you’re the narrator of the story, you’re still creating a character. You choose to emphasise parts of yourself that you like or that you think are relevant to the writing. Plus, there are parts of your identity and personality that you want to downplay, too.

I mean, think about how you change the way you speak for different audiences. Very few people talk to their parents the same way they do to their best friend or sibling.

All of these different versions of you are still you. You’re not pretending. You just have different facets of your personality and identity that matter more or less in different settings.

The same is true for your author persona. You adapt your language to fit how you want to present yourself and your story. For example, horror writers use language to create a creepy and mysterious persona. Romance writers might use more ethereal and seductive language.

So, sit down for a while. Think about what kinds of stories you want to write. What do all your story ideas have in common? How can you tie them all together to create a successful author persona? Then, ask yourself what parts of your personality and identity you could emphasise to match this. Once you’ve done that, you can think about how that might present itself in your language.

For me, my fantasy stories are about building communities and relying on one another to fight for justice. So, I make sure that I use language that emphasises teamwork and collective action rather than the usual ‘The Chosen One’ fantasy narrative. That adds to my unique writing style.

Proofread and edit your writing

The first draft of a story isn’t going to have a consistent writing style.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s not supposed to be consistent. Your first draft isn’t the place where you get all your language. It’s your time to get all your ideas down and work out important details such as plot and character arcs.

For a good story, you should have loads of drafts. Here’s what I recommend:

  1. Plot and character arcs.
  2. Symbolism and foreshadowing.
  3. Plot holes and characterisation.
  4. Tone and atmosphere.
  5. Writing style and dialogue.
  6. Spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Of course, there will be crossover. You might get to draft 4 and realise there’s a huge plot hole you need to address. Or you might need to draft even more than I suggest here! Don’t beat yourself up if that’s the case. These aren’t rigid phases that your story should hit in this exact order. They’re a guide to show you how many different hats you need to wear when rereading and refining your text.

But as you can see, the writing style doesn’t even come up until the last minute. That’s because you can’t be expected to perfect such a nuanced and subtle part of your story until you’ve got the building blocks sorted.

Now, you will always be writing in your style to some extent. However, this style-based draft is designed to check if the whole thing is consistent and matches. After all, I’ve already said that our style changes super quickly!

Plus, when you’re not obsessing about your style, you might notice some nice, subtle things that you do without thinking! That’s something you can notice and draw upon later on in the drafting process.

Gather feedback

It’s so important to get feedback from people in your ideal readership.

Of course, it will help you get insights on how your readers will react to your characters and plot details. That will help you know how well the story will do. But feedback can be super important for developing an effective writing style, too!

This is particularly true if you post where lots of other writers will read your text. For example, Wattpad has loads of very accomplished authors who want to tell you exactly what works well in your story. Sometimes, the feedback is brutal, but it’s worth it. In fact, the criticism is more useful than the praise! It shapes you as a writer.

With good feedback, the reader will pick out specific words and phrases that work well or poorly. Then, you can use that to figure out which parts of your style land with the audience and which could use some work.

When I published the first draft of a fantasy story to Wattpad, it revolutionised my writing style. An amazing writer left me a comment saying she loved one of the lines from the protagonist, ‘It was so terribly inconvenient to have to commit homicide in a corset’.

It was so helpful that she was so specific. I was able to analyse the quote and figure out why it worked so well so that I could do more of that. I came to the conclusion that it was a witty way to show my character was elegant and dangerous with a dry sense of humour.

That’s why it’s so useful for you to post your writing online or share it with friends. Let people be brutally honest. Find out what works and what doesn’t. That will help you to refine your style.

Conclusion: Considering Your Writing Style

As you can see, developing your own style isn’t necessarily difficult. It just takes some time and dedication. It might sound overwhelming at first. However, if you’re interested in becoming a writer yourself, it really is worth the effort.

I’d start by assessing your style right now. I never advocate for using ChatGPT to write stories because it’s pretty bad at it. However, it can be super useful for assessing the work you’ve already done! So if you’re struggling to analyse your work for yourself, you can always ask it for some help. Ask it to describe your style and give you five examples that best exemplify it.

Otherwise, ask the people in your life to help you! Get reactions from friends and family. Ask teachers and tutors to look at your work and tell you what it sounds like right now. That will give you a good basis to start with because it can help you figure out if you want to change your style completely or just refine what you’ve got.

Then, once you’ve made your decision, come back to this post and implement some of the techniques you’ve found.

Trust me: if you take them seriously, they’ll be a huge help for you! You’ll sound like a thoughtful, distinguished writer in no time!

Good luck!

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Article by Shani Cipro

Shani Cipro is a qualified English teacher with an MA in History from the University of Glasgow and a PGCE in Secondary English. She is currently teaching A-level English at a sixth form college in London, pursuing her MA in English (Literary Linguistics) at the University of Nottingham, and intends to pursue a PhD in the stylistics of representation in fantasy fiction. She is an avid reader, gamer, media enthusiast and budding writer. Her work was originally on ShanniiWrites, which has since evolved into Shani's Tutoring: a platform aiming to make education in English, Creative Writing and the Liberal Arts affordable to all. Shani is available to help students weekly here in this community. She provides as much free content as possible: from essays to glossary terms to simple advice. Plus, she runs low-cost webinars and courses that help students to get the highest grades in GCSE, A-level and IB.

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