A. Style Elements
Style
Proofreading is often focused solely on “correctness”: making sure that all the details are right and that language is used according to the rules. However, proofreading also offers a great opportunity to address more personal concerns. It’s a chance to focus on your style and allows you to craft the final product that best represents your unique perspective.
A writer’s style is what sets their writing apart. Style is the way writing is dressed up (or down) to fit the specific context, purpose, or audience. Word choice, sentence fluency, and the writer’s voice — all contribute to the style of a piece of writing. How a writer chooses words and structures sentences to achieve a certain effect is also an element of style. When Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he arranged his words to convey a sense of urgency and desperation. Had he written, “These are bad times,” it’s likely he wouldn’t have made such an impact!
Style is usually considered to be the province of literary writers. Novelists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are well known for their distinctive literary styles. But journalists, scientists, historians, and mathematicians also have distinctive styles, and they need to know how to vary their styles to fit different audiences. For example, the first-person narrative style of a popular magazine like National Geographic is quite different from the objective, third-person expository style of a research journal like Scientific American, even though both are written for informational purposes.
Not just right and wrong
Style is not a matter of right and wrong but of what is appropriate for a particular setting and audience. Consider the following two passages, which were written by the same author on the same topic with the same main idea yet have very different styles:
Example 1
“Experiments show that Heliconius butterflies are less likely to oviposit on host plants that possess eggs or egg-like structures. These egg mimics are an unambiguous example of a plant trait evolved in response to a host-restricted group of insect herbivores.”
“Heliconius butterflies lay their eggs on Passiflora vines. In defense, the vines seem to have evolved fake eggs that make it look to the butterflies as if eggs have already been laid on them.”
(Example from Myers, G. (1992). Writing biology: Texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 150.)
What changed was the audience. The first passage was written for a professional journal read by other biologists, so the style is authoritative and impersonal, using technical terminology suited to a professional audience. The second passage, written for a popular science magazine, uses a more dramatic style, setting up a conflict between the butterflies and the vines and using familiar words to help readers from non-scientific backgrounds visualize the