When facing the task of writing content for any medium, one of the most overlooked aspects is style. Your piece may be edited, spit-shined, and polished to a high sheen, free of typos and even passive voice; but if it’s style-free, it will be lacking in that certain something that makes it memorable.
What does ‘style’ mean to the written word? It’s that quality that makes writing unique, unlike any other piece of writing out there.
It’s the personality.
Consider the following excerpts from 20th century authors.
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
Ernest Hemingway
“Hills Like White Elephants”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye — with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.
Jack Kerouac
On the Road
Each of these writers achieved literary success in their lifetime, even though their respective writing styles dramatically varied. Hemingway, once a writer for the Kansas City Star newspaper, carried a terse, abbreviated style throughout his writing. Notice how all but two words have two syllables or less. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s style was more affected, longer-winded, with fuller descriptions. Kerouac wrote in stream-of-consciousness; the excerpt provided contains 102 words, all one sentence.
No reader of your Web site, press release, blog post, pamphlet, or otherwise will insist you muster the literary moxie of a Hemingway or Fitzgerald. They would appreciate, however, whether they know it or not, some personality.
The following excerpt is taken from the homepage of SageRock.com. I would describe our style as breezy, yet steadfastly capable.
The Web Marketing Digital Agency, SageRock Inc., was founded in 1999 to help clients engage customers across an ever expanding interactive marketplace. By using a nationally experienced, independent marketing agency focused only on digital deployment, our clients are able to navigate easily through this industry, take a holistic approach, leverage the right tools, and experience seamless implementation.
Now, consider that same copy, shifted to an uppity, high-brow style, dripping with arrogance.
Whilst lesser firms stymied marketing efforts for their clients, relying on passé campaign tactics to capture a passé space, SageRock, Inc. arose, a great beacon to navigate a new media. Our roster of clientele spans a nation-wide geography, clientele who are privy to the superior means by which SageRock, Inc. conducts marketing efforts; that is to say, digitally, holistically, and with excruciating perfection. Ne’er will come the day we dare deign to the everyman approach to marketing in the online space. It is common. It is perfunctory. It is not good enough. It is not SageRock, Inc.
Here is the snippet, yet again, this time presented in a tightly-wound sort of way, with very little inclusion of the extraneous.
SageRock, Inc. is a Digital Web Marketing Agency, founded in 1999. We assert to help clients engage their respective customers online.
Finally, the last example portrays the snippet in a completely low-key, laid-back vibe.
Welcome to SageRock, Inc. We’ve been around doing this gig for 10 years now. We pride ourselves on being wholly dedicated to digital marketing, working like mad to help our clients’ businesses grow. We’d be jazzed to help you, too. Just look around our site and if you have any questions, let us know.
Each snippet communicates the same information, but does so in varying ways. Think of your business and how you would like readers of your written media to think of you. Are you arrogant? Humorous? No-nonsense? Whimsical? Convoluted? Down-to-earth? Pick a personality, and let your writing perpetuate that through style.
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