What is Your Writing Style?

How do you want your intended audience to perceive your writing? Does it reveal your personality your voice, your mood, whether happy, sad, mad, glad, indifferent, or informative? Syntactical structure, parsing prose, diction, and thoughts put into usable frameworks changes, contribute to the overall style or your work.

You have to decide whether you want to inform, persuade or to entertain. A person writing a letter of complaint would write a different letter than someone writing a letter of condolence.

There are basically three types of styles, Technical, Business and Conversational.

Technical Writing Style  

Just as the name suggests, Technical Writing is used when you are writing technical documents where a clear and concise language is needed that can be understood by your readers. It clarifies jargon and is used in short sentences without unnecessary words. This makes it easy to understand. Technical writing avoids using parentheses or brackets which separates the word from the context, expressing that just part of your writing is related to the topic. There should be no double negatives (ever, anything, anyone, hardly, doubt, not or never etc.) eg. I doubt he ever owed anything to anyone. Technical style never includes the use of slang. It usually communicates applications, procedures and regulations, technology, and instructions.  Poor Technical writing creates confusion by creating jargon and fails to explain what it is you are writing about. Style can be sacrificed if clarity is needed. Anyone can be a technical writer as long as you have the data, you don't need to be an expert. You see Technical writing with online help, manuals, release notes, guides, proposals and disclaimers. You need to know your intended audience and what their goals are when writing technically. There are three types of Technical Writing:

• End-user assistance (user manuals)
• Documentation (maintenance, repair, specifications, research and reference, reports and journals)
• Marketing Communication (catalogues, brochures, advertisements and press releases. 

Business Writing Style 

This style of writing is akin to Technical Writing, except longer sentences are used and acceptable. Used to properly convey a message, by purpose. Examples would be free-writing, planning, research, outlining, storyboarding and clustering. It needs to be purposeful, economical and reader orientated and should express your ideas rather than impressing the audience, getting the message across clearly and simply. Business Writing can be divided into three phases and can be rearranged or even repeated in some cases. It involves collaborating with others and working in teams:

• analyzing, anticipating and adapting
• research, organization and composition
• revising, proofreading and evaluating.

Conversational Writing Style 

In this style personal pronouns, contractions and colloquialisms are used. It must be your personal expression of events, which sets the mood, and leads the reader to a subjective, non-literal, emotional understanding of the subject or topic.

In conclusion you must tailor your writing to the situation involved. Variety in writing style reduces monotony and may be influenced by the writers cultural background.