Style Tips

1. Style Tips

2. Magic Three • Listing things in threes: nouns, phrases, etc. Examples: • A happy life is one spent yearning, earning, and learning. • Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. • I really wish to be a Hollywood movie star and have my own trailer with mirrored walls and a sandwich tray delivered every hour by a handsome man named Jacques.

3. Figurative Language • Use similes, metaphors, personification • Careful to avoid cliché and mixed metaphors Ex: His fancy car ran like a hummingbird on a warm, silent day. Jesse felt proud walking to the playground because the smaller kids were in awe of the paper number on his back. It was as if he were a soldier going off to war. (from Gary Soto, “Baseball in April”)

4. Specific Details • Imagery helps reader visualize person, place, or thing described Ex: (from Annie Dillard, An American Childhood): I had hit pay dirt. For all I knew, there were paramecia too, in that pond water, or daphniae, or stentors, or any of the many creatures I had read about but never seen: volvox, the spherical algae colony; euglena with its one red eye; the elusive, glassy diatom; hydra, rotifers, water bears, worms. Anything was possible. The sky was the limit.

5. Repetition for Effect • To stress a certain idea, you can repeat a word or phrase as a stylistic device. Ex: I never played Peter Pan and flew to Never-Never Land. I was never Cinderella getting ready for the Ball to dance the night away with Prince Charming. I was never Jane waiting for Tarzan in our tree hut.