Style (fiction)
Encyclopedia
In fiction
, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character
, theme
, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction
.
is a form of narrative
, one of the four rhetorical modes
of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes and conventions. Agent and author Evan Marshall identifies five fiction-writing modes: action, summary, dialogue, feelings/thoughts, and background . Author and writing-instructor Jessica Page Morrell
lists six delivery modes for fiction-writing: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition . Author Peter Selgin
refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scene, and description . Currently, there is no consensus within the writing community regarding the number and composition of fiction-writing modes
and their uses.
, third-person narrative, unreliable narrator
, stream-of-consciousness writing. A narrator may be either obtrusive or unobtrusive, depending on the author's intended relationship between himself, the narrator, the point-of-view character, and the reader.
to refer to descriptive language that evokes sensory experience. Imagery may be in many forms, such as metaphor
s and simile
s.
is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks, inter-word spaces
, and indentation.
, in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary
choices and style of expression. Literary diction analysis reveals how a passage establishes tone
and characterization; for example, a preponderance of verbs relating physical movement suggests an active character, while a preponderance of verbs relating states of mind portrays an introspective character.
, grammar
refers to the logic
al and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences
, phrase
s, and words in any given natural language
. Grammar also refers to the study of such rules. This field includes morphology
and syntax
, often complemented by phonetics
, phonology
, semantics
, and pragmatics
.
, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability to form mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses.
is the grammatical
and lexical
relationship within a text or sentence
. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning.
is the reader's temporary acceptance of story elements as believable, regardless of how implausible they may seem in real life.
, the voice
(also called diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its argument
s (subject, object, etc.). When the subject
is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.
is an admonition to fiction
writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description.
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
, theme
Theme (literature)
A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...
, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
.
Fiction-writing modes
FictionFiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
is a form of narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, one of the four rhetorical modes
Rhetorical modes
Rhetorical modes describe the variety, conventions, and purposes of the major kinds of writing. Four of the most common rhetorical modes and their purpose are exposition, argumentation, description, and narration....
of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes and conventions. Agent and author Evan Marshall identifies five fiction-writing modes: action, summary, dialogue, feelings/thoughts, and background . Author and writing-instructor Jessica Page Morrell
Jessica Page Morrell
Jessica Page Morrell is an American author, writing coach, freelance editor, corporate trainer, and columnist. Her articles have been published in The Writer and Writer's Digest magazines. She is a former food-and-wine columnist, restaurant reviewer, and freelance journalist...
lists six delivery modes for fiction-writing: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition . Author Peter Selgin
Peter Selgin
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is currently the at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.-Biography:...
refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scene, and description . Currently, there is no consensus within the writing community regarding the number and composition of fiction-writing modes
Fiction-writing modes
A fiction-writing mode is a manner of writing with its own set of conventions regarding how, when, and where it should be used.Fiction is a form of narrative, one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes...
and their uses.
Narrator
The narrator is the teller of the story, the orator, doing the mouthwork, or its in-print equivalent. A writer is faced with many choices regarding the narrator of a story: first-person narrativeFirst-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
, third-person narrative, unreliable narrator
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
, stream-of-consciousness writing. A narrator may be either obtrusive or unobtrusive, depending on the author's intended relationship between himself, the narrator, the point-of-view character, and the reader.
Point of View
Point of view is from whose consciousness the reader hears, sees, and feels the story.Allegory
Allegory is a work of fiction in which the symbols, characters, and events come to represent, in somewhat point-by-point fashion, a different metaphysical, political, or social situation.Tone
Tone refers to the attitude that a story creates toward its subject matter. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many other possible attitudes. Tone is sometimes referred to as the mood that the author establishes within the story.Imagery
Imagery is used in fictionFiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
to refer to descriptive language that evokes sensory experience. Imagery may be in many forms, such as metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
s and simile
Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", "as". Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison, similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas...
s.
Punctuation
PunctuationPunctuation
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks, inter-word spaces
Interword separation
In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other languages of Europe and the Mideast, the word divider is a blank space, or whitespace, a convention which is spreading, along with other aspects...
, and indentation.
Word choice
DictionDiction
Diction , in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story...
, in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
choices and style of expression. Literary diction analysis reveals how a passage establishes tone
Setting tone
Authors set a Tone in literature by conveying emotions/feelings through words. The way a person feels about an idea/concept, event, or another person can be quickly determined through facial expressions, gestures and in the tone of voice used. In literature an author sets the tone through words...
and characterization; for example, a preponderance of verbs relating physical movement suggests an active character, while a preponderance of verbs relating states of mind portrays an introspective character.
Grammar
In linguisticsLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
refers to the logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
al and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
, phrase
Phrase
In everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words which form a constituent and so function as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than a clause....
s, and words in any given natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
. Grammar also refers to the study of such rules. This field includes morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, often complemented by phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
, phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
, and pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
.
Imagination
ImaginationImagination
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability to form mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses.
Cohesion
CohesionCohesion
Cohesion may refer to:* Cohesion , the intermolecular attraction between like-molecules* Cohesion , a measure of how well the lines of source code within a module work together...
is the grammatical
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
and lexical
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
relationship within a text or sentence
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning.
Suspension of Disbelief
Suspension of disbeliefSuspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...
is the reader's temporary acceptance of story elements as believable, regardless of how implausible they may seem in real life.
Voice
In grammarGrammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
, the voice
Voice
Voice may refer to:* Human voice* Voice control or voice activation* Writer's voice* Voice acting* Voice vote* Voice message-In film:* Voice , a 2005 South Korean film* The Voice , a 2010 Turkish horror film directed by Ümit Ünal...
(also called diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its argument
Verb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
s (subject, object, etc.). When the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.
Show, Don't Tell
Show, don't tellShow, don't tell
This page is about the composition principle. For the Rush song, see Show Don't Tell Show, don't tell is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the...
is an admonition to fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description.
See also
- FictionFictionFiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
- Creative nonfictionCreative nonfictionCreative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not primarily written in service...
- Fiction-writing modesFiction-writing modesA fiction-writing mode is a manner of writing with its own set of conventions regarding how, when, and where it should be used.Fiction is a form of narrative, one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes...
- Show, don't tellShow, don't tellThis page is about the composition principle. For the Rush song, see Show Don't Tell Show, don't tell is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the...
- NarrativeNarrativeA narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...