Different Types of Writing Styles

You’ll encounter many different writing styles in your adult reading, especially in college. When reading a textbook, you might be tempted to give up. If you’re doing research, you might skip the hard article and read the easy (less specific) ones.

Critical reading is a vital skill to help you deal with these different writing styles. The following is a series of examples of some different or complex writing styles. There are also some tips for dealing with each specific type of reading.

Critical reading means stopping to look up information you do not know. This page includes several good, general online reference materials to help you get started:

None of these readings are “bad,” they are just written differently. Sometimes your writing comes from a different time, sometimes from someone who is trying to sound “educated,” and sometimes from a different style.

For example, until about 20 years ago, the business world loved stuff that took up space and sounded fancy. Then they realized that clarity was more important and started having workshops about how to cut communications to the clear minimum. Therefore, anything from the business world before the 1980s is likely to be bloated and complicated (even when it doesn’t need to be). Anything from the 80s on is likely to be more direct. But there are still people trained the old way publishing.

Elevated writing styles.

Some writing is straightforward, except for one little thing. Both of these are examples of that. Faulkner’s speech is direct, but some of the word choices and sentence structures are out of date. Buckley wrote a hilarious, light-hearted piece about modern man is intimidated by the structure of society. Unfortunately, it’s only funny if you’ve swallowed a dictionary at some point in your life.

Faulkner, William. Banquet Speech, 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature Award. nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB. 2015. Web. 24 Jan 2014.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Some archaic vocabulary: we don’t see “ephemeral” much, but it’s a good word; “verities” is just old-fashioned; and “glands” is an old way of saying “it’s hormonal.” Since the rest of the writing is pretty straight-forward, you can probably just look those words up as you encounter them.
Some archaic sentence structures: The longer sentences are a sign of this, here. In another section, he has what we’d consider an awkwardly phrased sentence. As with the vocabulary, you can simply re-read the sentence because Faulkner’s writing is mostly clear.

Buckley, William F. “Why We Don’t Complain.”40 Model Essays: A Portable Anthology. Jane E. Aaron. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 64-70. Print.

The conductor had nonchalantly walked down the gauntlet of eighty sweating American freemen, and not one of them had asked him to explain why the passengers in that car had been consigned to suffer. There isn’t anything to be done when the temperature outdoors is 85 degrees, and indoors the air conditioner has broken down; obviously when that happens there is nothing to do, except perhaps curse the day that one was born. But when the temperature outdoors is below freezing, it takes a positive act of will on somebody’s part to set the temperature indoors at 85. Somewhere a valve was turned too far, a furnace overstoked, a thermostat maladjusted: something that could easily be remedied by turning off the heat and allowing the great outdoors to come indoors. All this is so obvious. What is not obvious is what has happened to the American people.

Elevated vocabulary: While there’s nothing wrong with any of the words Buckley uses here, the sheer number of references makes reading this more difficult than something like Faulkner’s speech. There are 4-5 vocabulary words in the first sentence, alone (conductor, nonchalant, gauntlet, freemen, consigned). With that density, I recommend you stop reading, skim for vocab, look them up, then have the definitions at hand while you read.
Overly complex sentences: This is something you saw a little of in Faulkner, but since not all sentences were long, it didn’t stick out as badly. In this case, just re-read the sentence again. (It’s like skimming a passage for main ideas and then re-reading it for comprehension.)

Complex writing or ideas.

This stuff is like the elevated writing, but it’s more dense and harder to read. Simply having a dictionary or encyclopedia at hand doesn’t speed up the reading process. Older writing is more likely to use this florid “academic” style than newer writing, but newer writers are equally liable to write like this. Both of these examples are readable with a little effort on your part.

Kumpf, Eric P. “Visual Metadiscourse: Designing the Considerate Text.” Technical Communication Quarterly 9.4 (Fall 2000): 401-242. Print.

The categories of interpretation and commentary are perhaps the two categories that best help define and illustrate the general concept of metadiscourse. They both show a separation of content, what VandeKopple calls “the propositional content,” from metadiscourse, the “writing about writing.” When interpreting a graph in the text, writers acknowledge that the facts, data, or information cannot exist on their own and must be interpreted. With interpretation, writers help control the interpretive process of the reader. Unlike many of the other categories of visual metadiscourse, interpretation does not reside inherently in a document. A writer must deliberately include it, which supports this category as illustrative of metadiscourse. Moreover, interpretation explains how the data represented visually relates to the arguments of the writers and why the data is important.

Bonus info: meta-anything just means the study of it, as you see in the passage above. In college, especially, you’ll see meta-theater, meta-literature, meta-cognition, meta-theory, meta-psychological... all it means is writing about how we write, thinking about how we think, etc.
Vocabulary is not a major issue in this piece. We even have metadiscourse defined a few sentences in. However, if you don’t know any of these key words, you will not understand this piece. Words like metadiscourse, inherent, and illustrative are the key ideas. Make sure you stop and look them up. If a word is repeated, make sure you write the definition down so you always have it as a reference and key idea.
Sentence complexity: there are a lot of complex sentences with subordinate clauses. These aren’t necessarily “hard” sentences, but you may have to re-read them. If you’re having trouble, try blocking out the unnecessary information (non-restrictive element). For example, if you simplify this sentence (remove the gray non-restrictive elements), it’s far easier to read: They both show a separation of content, what VandeKopple calls “the propositional content,” from metadiscourse, the “writing about writing.”If you’ve been keeping track of the vocabulary, this is fairly easy to read.

Bettelheim, Bruno. “The Struggle for Meaning.”Folk and Fairy Tales.Eds. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek.3rd ed. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2002. 376-91. Print.

Through the centuries (if not millennia) during which, in their retelling, fairy tales became ever more refined, they came to convey at the same time overt and covert meanings—came to speak simultaneously to all levels of the human personality, communicating in a manner which reaches the uneducated mind of the child as well as that of the sophisticated adult. Applying the psychoanalytic model of the human personality, fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time. By dealing with universal human problems, particularlythose which preoccupy the child's mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures. As the stories unfold, they give conscious credence and body to id pressures and show ways to satisfy these that are in line with ego and superego requirements.

As with Kumpf, vocabulary and sentence complexity play a large part in increasing the reading difficulty of this piece.
Translation issues. Bettelheim was not a native English speaker. You will often find this kind of formal, complex writing in translated works and works by non-native speakers. This is probably just a sign of comfort or familiarity—and just something to be prepared for when you read.
Jargon, specialized terms for the field (psychology), plays a larger part in this passage than in Kumpf. While Kumpf used some terms he defined, Bettelheim’s arguments rely on psychological jargon. You need a foundation in psychotherapy and familiarity with terms like personality/identity, differences in the child and adult mind, and the levels of the mind (awareness), the id/ego/superego. Doing some basic research, you’ll find that Bettleheim is a Freudian—and an overview of Freudian psychology will give you the necessary background. This kind of general information is where Wikipedia tends to shine.

Dense and horrible to read.

This is the stuff you never want to read again. Unfortunately, you can’t always avoid it—especially as it frequently contains great information. Read smart and decrease the pain. By taking the time to read carefully and take effective notes the first time, you won’t have to discard the content, re-read, or fake anything later.

Kumpf, Eric P. “Visual Metadiscourse: Designing the Considerate Text.” Technical Communication Quarterly 9.4 (Fall 2000): 401-242. Print.

Expanding metadiscourse to the visual realm both alters and confirms the concept of metadiscourse as defined for text. An alteration of metadiscourse results from the distinction of metadiscourse words from the content on which they are applied. In Williams’ definition of metadiscource as “writing about writing,” we see a separation between the writing on one level and writing at the level of metadiscourse. Writing at the first level VandeKopple calls the propositional content and it may be affected by metadiscourse from any of his seven categories. However, Luming Mao in “I Conclude Not: Toward a Pragmatic Account of Metadiscourse” warns that such distinctions may unnecessarily relegate metadiscourse as a secondary discourse to the primary discourse of the propositional content (265). Perhaps an apt metaphor to show the disjunction Mao warns against would be calling metadiscourse the frosting on the cake of propositional content, in which the cake is the primary and substantive part made palatable by the frosting. Visual metadiscourse supports Mao’s concern that metadiscourse factors as much as the propositional content in the construction of a text; that is, that metadiscourse is inherent in every speech act, sometimes to the extent that the reader is interested because of the metadiscourse. In some discourses, the metadiscourse may be primary, depending on the rhetorical context.

I largely threw this in because the style is so much more dense than in the Kumpf passage above—from the same article. It’s a good example of how different parts of the same text can be more complex than others. Don’t feel like it’s your problem if you need to take notes in one part of a text when you didn’t need to in another.
This is a good example of how “real” writers integrate quotes and sources in their arguments.
See the other examples in this section for tips on reading this type of passage.

Hendler, Glenn. “The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel Author(s).” American Literary History 3.4 (Win 1991): 685-706.

Work aims to refigure the sentimental novel's political address to women, to transform sympathetic identification into an interpellation of a liberal feminist subject. In articulating that goal, Alcott expands the genre's covert struggle with domestic ideology into new territory, extending the genre's figurative feminization of culture further into the public sphere. However conscious she was of her political project, she was unable to resolve for much more than a moment the contradictions inherent in trying to produce an image of simultaneously intimate and political community in a mass-cultural literary form. The final image, even as it refigures the rhetoric of the family in its use of the word "sisters," is undermined by its juxtaposition with the uneasy incestuousness of the Carrols' simulated family. And the novel never succeeds in articulating an individual form of public femininity that is not undermined by the threat of narcissism or self-loss, as in Christie's own description of her non-agential political speech.

This is a good example of dense writing. I know every word used in here, the theories he discusses, and am very familiar with Alcott’s works. Reading this is a miserable experience for me.
Vocabulary is a problem, including words such as interpellation, articulating, ideology, and inherent. If you don’t know them, you’re lost. Again, the easy way to deal with this is to skim for vocabulary and have those definitions already at hand when you read for content. This will help, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
Theory and concepts: few authors can discuss theory clearly and coherently. Most of the time, when you get into a discussion of theory it sounds like this. Read the passage for the ideas and theories in it, like you would for vocabulary. For example, you might look up “the sentimental novel,” “women’s roles in 19th century literature/Alcott,” “liberal feminists,” “domestic ideology,” “incestuousness in domestic novels,” “political agendas,” and “identity and self-loss.”
Complexity of sentences and ideas. A good reading tip when you have a lot of information is to summarize at the end of each section. When you encounter a complex passage such as this, summarize each sentence or thought as you encounter it. Keep track of which paragraph it belongs to, and you’ll never have to read it again. If you need a paraphrase—already done. If you need a quote—you know exactly which paragraph to look in.

Lüthi, Max. “The Fairy-Tale Hero: The Image of Man in the Fairy Tale.” Folk and Fairy Tales.Eds. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek.3rd ed. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2002. 365-76. Print.

The grownup, still under the influence of the Enlightenment andrealism, quickly turns away from the fairy tale with a feeling ofcontempt. But in modern art, fascination with the fairy tale iseverywhere evident. The turning away from descriptive realism,from the mere description of external reality in itself, implies anapproach to the fairy tale. The same can be said of the fantasticmixtures of human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, which, like thefairy tale, bring all things into relationship with one another.Modern architecture has a great preference for what is light,bright, and transparent; one often refers to the dematerialization inarchitecture, the sublimation of matter. The sublimation of allmaterial things, however, is one of the basic characteristics offairy-tale style. We find crystal-clear description combined withelusive, mysterious meaning in fairy tales, in modern lyric, poetry,and in Ernst Jünger and Franz Kafka, who has said that true realityis always unrealistic. The modern American writer W.H.Auden has said, "The sort of pleasure we get from folk fairy talesseems to me similar to that which we derive from Mallarme'spoems or from abstract painting." We are not surprised at such astatement. The fairy tale is a basic form of literature, and of art ingeneral. The ease and calm assurance with which it stylizes, sublimates,and abstracts makes it the quintessence of the poeticprocess, and art in the twentieth century has again been receptiveto it. We no longer view it as mere entertainment for children andthose of childlike disposition. The psychologist, the pedagogue, knows the fairy tale is a fundamental building block and an outstanding aid in development for the child…

This passage has the same features as Hendler, plus a few extras. As before, reading carefully, taking notes, summarizing, and using reference books (dictionary, encyclopedia) will be your salvation.
Breadth of subject material. Most of the other passages have stuck to one field: psychology, communication, typography, culture, etc. In this passage, Lüthi discusses ideological movements (Enlightenment, modern art, descriptive realism…), philosophy (descriptive realism, external reality), architecture, literary genres, art, and psychology.