Originally I was going to ghostwrite for a roommate of mine who had a paper due in her class about Siberian shamanism the next week. She wasn't very good at explaining her ideas, or giving me facts, and because her primary source was 200 pages long, I wasn't about to spend an entire afternoon and evening catching up on mystical practices in a place I don't know too much about the culture to begin with. Her style was immensely different from mine, and my best efforts to imitate and recreate failed miserably; I sounded like an inverted form of myself.
This headache pushed me to search for other options. My brother had a paper on Honore de Balzac (possibly my favorite name for an author, as mature as that is) due next week, and he was already done with his outline including some quotations pulled out and ready to use. It was nice because I had far too much information about a subject I knew a little about, compared with my first attempt where I had barely any information on something I knew nothing about. I also have a more similiar style to my brother's writing, then to most and this made it easier to attempt and pretend I was him when writing.
In general though, this assignment has really made me question where we get our writing style from? Our favorite author? Our most frequent editor? A teacher? Or does a lot of our writing style come from within?
I think a lot of us would agree that we speak in similiar patterns to our close friends, each borrowing variations on our common language, but we don't often write academically with our close friends. So who is analogus to a close friend in terms of the formation of your writing style?
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4 comments:
You bring up a good question there at the end. I have realized that my writing style starts differently than it end each semester. I tend to write for my reader, so whatever stylistic changes my teacher suggests I tend to make.
On an opposite note, my grammar and puncuation comes from my dad who frequently edited my papers in grade school and high school. Because of him I can never end a sentence in a paper with "of" or "as". It's the most memorable critique.
interesting questions. i think we get our writing styles from some sort of inspiration from reading texts. at least for me it's a conglomeration of different snippets of style from many different authors and writers which i combine and put my own twist on.
I believe that I get my academic writing style from papers I've read and teachers/professors who grade and comment on my work.
That is very interesting. I also did a writing for my brother and I noticed that we do write similarily. This made me think that it's from within or a parent or authority because I would always remember my dad reading and correcting my siblings essays, so sometimes I would write in ways that I knew my dad wouldn't correct. If I had to guess though, I think we each develop our own style that is highly influenced by others.
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