Writing is a versatile form. It is in equal measure a necessity and an art form. Necessity because our day doesn’t pass without reading the latest news on the paper or Twitter however one prefers. And art because neither of us can do this life without a book, or a well-written tv show. In all its usages, writing is always expressing meaningful thoughts and ideas, back from the time when it was only hieroglyphics and cuneiform. 

Its primary purposes are to record, save and allow the spread of information from one person to another. And with further craft, writing also allows the space to structure, paint a picture, organize, persuade, elaborate or entertain. Based on what the writer wants to say, or how the writer wants to say it, different kinds of writing styles can be invoked. 

What’s a writing style?

A writing style is simply the way in which a writer conveys his ideas to his audience depending upon the purpose of the text. If the writer is writing to sell a product, then the writing style would be very persuasive and attention-grabbing. Or if the writer wants to tell a story then his writing style would be narrative and possibly full of descriptions. Based on the goal of the text, different styles of writing can exist. 

There are four different main writing styles. They are persuasive, narrative, expository, and descriptive. Almost all written work can fall into these categories; from the how-to-use instructions on shampoo bottles to news stories to novels to recipes. In this blog post, we will do a deep dive into each of the categories and explore with a few examples how different styles tell us the purpose of the writing. 

Note: These styles of writing should not be confused with ‘style’ in writing. That style is a compositional element of writing and is similar in meaning to the author’s voice. It is considered alongside tone, mood, sentence feel etc. and is a part of literary theory.

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Different Types of Writing Styles

1. Persuasive Writing

As is clear from the word persuasive, the writer here is always trying to convince the reader of something. In persuasive writing, the writer tries to explain or establish an idea or opinion which is usually backed by cogent justifications and arguments. There are many uses of this writing style, for example in cover letters, or newspaper editorials, marketing advertisements, letters of recommendation, book reviews etc. 

Let us see this example of a cover letter and analyse what makes this text a piece of persuasive writing. 

Example 1: ‘I am applying for the position of associate in the outreach department of your company. I have five years of experience in managing a creative organization. I’ve been in charge of the smallest of things from making sure of the documentation and stationary inventory to plotting quarterly fundraising. During my two years as the partnerships and outreach lead at XYZ organization, I developed connections with three new NGOs, and two media houses and doubled the efforts in engaging with older partners which resulted in a 30% decrease in input resources, which is very significant for a small size creative company. I am a dynamic and motivated person and I believe I would be the perfect fit for this role’.

Analysis: In this piece, we see that the writer uses a lot of information to build up a case that they have the experience, talent and motivation to be the right person for this role. With all the data and facts used, the person is in the end making a case for getting hired. The writing is direct, strong and convincing. Strong words and rhetoric are easily found in persuasive writing.

Let us take another example, this time a review of a movie.

Example 2: ‘Let me spare you almost 3 hours of your life. If you want to feel pain as well as depression with good imagery then this is the movie for you. The movie made my head hurt but most of all it tugged at already my bleak view of the world we, unfortunately, are living in. That’s all. 2/10 good acting from the alright alright alright guy.’

Analysis: This is a very persuasive review that starts with strong emotion. It appeals to the reader to save their precious time. This particularly is a 2-star Google review for the movie Interstellar by Christopher Nolan. Persuasive writing is always about taking the subjective into the objective. By giving reasons and facts associated with the writer’s opinion he/she/they can show the reader why and how they can believe the writer’s experience. In this case, the writer explains how because the world is already bleak, it does not make sense to add any more bleak tropes to it. 

2. Narrative Writing

Narrative writing is a kind of writing style mostly associated with stories, or anything told with the help of a story. The word narrative is synonymous with story, and more specifically means an account of interconnected events that add up to make sense. In narrative writing, the writer often uses characters, settings and events to explain or provide information. Most commonly, narrative writing is the style of novelists, storytellers or poets (although a lot of poetry is descriptive in nature, it more often than not also follows the narrative. There is also distinctively narrative poetry). But even outside fiction, creative nonfiction (or narrative non-fiction) is a good example of the narrative style of writing being used to provide real-world, or experiential/subjective information. In this writing style, the author will describe situations or engage characters in a way to drive the story and answer the questions posed by it. 

Let us take this example of an excerpt from the iconic essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion. 

Example 1: ‘The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.’

Analysis: In this paragraph, the author Joan Didion is narrating the situation in the US, particularly Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It is a narrative journalistic piece that gains its power through the story the writer is telling being right in the ground, smack in the middle of the action. By telling us the story in an impartial yet narrativized way, she is allowing us to participate in the setting and develop our own understanding which is different from what a piece of persuasive writing will attempt. 

Another example we are considering here is a children’s classic, the original Cinderella, written in 1812 by brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Example 2: “Is the stupid creature to sit in the same room with us?” said they; “those who eat food must earn it. She is nothing but a kitchen- maid!” They took away her pretty dresses, and put on her an old gray kirtle, and gave her wooden shoes to wear.

Analysis: In this narrative style, the writers are telling the story of how the new wife and step sisters are treating Cinderella. Characters interacting with each other, conflict, and scene action are some of the ways to easily identify the narrative style in writing. 

3. Descriptive Writing 

The purpose of descriptive writing is to describe a situation, event, person, animal or surroundings. The whole idea behind invoking the descriptive style is to add more colour to the scene the author is setting and to help the reader see the details of the scene. For example, the author could say ‘This here is the table on which Mr Mandalay stood and danced all night.’ This statement does not yet depict the descriptive style as we as readers get to know very less about the surroundings there, in fact, in its state this statement is shedding light on the events of the night and hence is a narrative style in its current form where we get to know that Mr Mandalay danced all night. 

In order to turn this into a descriptive style, the author could write the sentence as follows: ‘The mahogany table which was located on the right end of the hall had a stark pink table cloth on the top of it with detailed light pink embroidery done by the village women. Mr Mandalay was all decked up for the night wearing his father’s Armani suit with a light green shirt that had gemstone buttons. He walked to the mahogany table and inhaled the deep wood scent. And keeping one leg on it first, he climbed over and dirtied the rani pink with his wide footprints as he resorted to dancing all night.’

Descriptive writing tends to be poetic at times. It is found in fiction, in narrative non-fiction, poetry, diary entries etc. 

Let us consider some examples from literature in order to better understand what the style is all about. This example of purely descriptive writing is the opening paragraph from the short story ‘The Wave’ by Liam O’Flaherty. 

Example 1: The cliff was two hundred feet high. It sloped outwards from its grassy summit, along ten feet of brown gravel, down one hundred and seventy feet of grey limestone, giant slabs piled horizontally with large slits between the slabs where sea birds nested. The outward slope came to a round point twenty feet from the base and there the cliff sank inwards, making a dark cavern along the cliffs face into the bowels of the earth. At the mouth the cavern was twenty feet high and at the rear its roof touched its floor, a flat rock that stretched from the base of the cliff to the sea. The cavern had a black-slate roof and at the rear there was a large streak of yellow gravel.

Analysis: There is a whole lot of description in this paragraph. One learns about the height of the cliff, and the colors the narrator can see there. There are also sea birds nesting in between the cliff and a deep cavern at the base. 

Let us take a poem by Robert Frost called Out, Out as an example to understand the use of the descriptive style in poems. 

Example 2: The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

Analysis: From this poem, we draw that probably wood is being sawed inside a yard, and one can hear the buzz, and see the dust around in the room and when a breeze flows, one can even smell the scent of the wood.
This is a perfect example because the writer is describing his senses – what he can see, smell, hear etc.

4. Expository Writing

Expository writing is about explaining a certain idea or concept. It is used to share information. Expository writing is usually clear and concise and uses data and results to build a strong understanding of the reader. It is usually fact-based writing and does not involve expressing the writer’s personal opinion. The writer is a detached observer and cannot be subjective. 

Some examples of expository writing are academic text, research papers, technical writing, business writing, news stories etc. 

Let us see this example of a piece where the author is explaining the need for good gut bacteria for our overall health. 

Example 1: Probiotics are the talk of the town these days. One can easily procure them not just from medical shops but also the department stores where a few wellness brands have revolutionized the space by selling bottled drinks with cultures that have 5 to 10 billion good bacteria. There are many ways to get probiotics naturally in our diet, such as by eating curd or Greek yoghurt on a daily basis, preferably for breakfast or lunch. Fermented foods like kimchi or kombucha are also great natural bacterial profiles for the gut. 

Analysis: In this example, the author explains a few facts about probiotics, like where to find them, which foods contain good bacteria etc. There are numbers involved to paint a more factual picture. The first line, although, has a slight rhetoric and phrasing but it still is not the author’s subjective opinion but an observation they have done in their experience as an expert on the subject. 

Here is another example of a business writing piece

Example 2: The results of our biannual surveys have shown some unexpected trends. The data indicated that our in-person and physical promotions and partnerships got us more traffic and engagement than social media. Although, for a company like ours Twitter was the better platform for conversions. 

Analysis: This business writing piece is concise, and provides information based on the data they collected through the biannual surveys. Notice how the language is not at all frilly. It does not even offer much explanation or elaboration of the data. On the other hand, in example 1 we see that language is used a bit more creatively. As much as it is about giving the reader information, it is also to be said in an engaging way to keep the reader’s attention. In business writing, internal office documents, and industry reports the language is more often than not straightforward. It has brevity and communicates only the essential or salient points. 

Can one piece of writing have multiple styles?

Yes! A piece of writing can have more than one style. For example, it is quite easy to find the narrative and descriptive styles bunched together in a novel or a story. A good narrative structure always intends to place the reader inside the story and for that the descriptive style comes of use. 

If we take the previous example of Mr Mandalay himself, dancing upon the table, we see that the scene is improved by adding descriptions to it. It helps the reader to see what the characters are seeing and that makes the story more relatable and engaging. Sometimes, persuasive pieces like op-eds or essays built a narrative in order to prove a point by building a story. Journalistic pieces are usually balanced and tell the story of all sides, and in that sense, they are primarily expository but when they take the help of a story to root the incident or the news, they can also be written in the narrative style. One can see such things in long-form journalism. 

As is tradition, let us take the help of an example to understand how more than one writing style is invoked in a piece. This is an example from the novel ‘Conversations with Friends’ by author Salley Rooney.

Example: ‘We talked about our break-up for the first time that night. It felt like opening a door that’s been inside your own house all along, a door that you walk past every day and try never to think about. Bobbi told me I had made her miserable. We were sitting on my bed, Bobbi against the headboard with the pillows propped behind her, me at the foot of the mattress sitting with crossed legs. She said that I’d laughed at her during arguments like she was a moron. I told her what Melissa said, that I wasn’t a very nice person. Bobbi laughed herself then. Melissa would know, she said. When has she ever been nice to anyone?’

Analysis: The narrator is writing the story of her conversation with another character, her best friend and ex-girlfriend, Bobbi. They are talking about their breakup for the first time. There is also information about other characters such as Melissa telling us the kind of person Melissa could be. All this makes this paragraph most certainly a narrative one. But then there are elements of description too such as the imagery and metaphor in the first sentence about opening a door inside the house that one walks past every day but doesn’t open. They are best friends, but they also remember they were lovers and that one conversation about why they separated is always lingering in the background. The narrator also describes the scene as to how Bobbi and she are sitting. Metaphors, similes, imagery and descriptions of surroundings all qualify this prose into the descriptive style of writing too. 

Conclusion

All in all, all writing can be covered and labelled through these four different writing styles. Persuasive writing convinces, narrative writing tells a story, descriptive writing describes an event, place or person and expository writing explains or provides facts. There are many different forms of writing that come under these styles. A writer should be well aware of the writing style they are using while writing something in order to mould and shape the text to interact with the reader or audience in a more engaging manner. 

Can you guess the kind of writing that we are doing in this very blog post? Is it persuasive, narrative, descriptive or expository? Well, that’s a question we’ll leave for you to answer! (Hint: it doesn’t end with an e)