Chapter 16 Summary

Chapter 16 discusses how you as a writer can write with style. This chapter has two major sections, the first section is how you can start writing with style and the second section discusses how you can polish your style. This is important to keep in mind while writing your paper because you want your voice to be heard and you want to express yourself in your paper. Writing with style will help make your paper stand out compared to someone else's paper. To start developing your style this chapter makes some suggestions on how you can go about that. You first as a writer need to understand your writing situation and that is your starting point. This will help you develop an appropriate style that relates to your audience. For example, if you were writing an essay for 5th graders your sentences would be far less complex then if you were writing to a group of 5th grade teachers. Another tip they suggest is that you should write concisely. This means removing unnecessary modifiers, take out unnecessary intro. phrases and eliminate stock phrases. Next they suggest that you use active and passive voice effectively and stick to the same point of view meaning either consistently writing in first, second, or third person. After that you will want to find words that will keep the audience engaged. This will also help frame your argument. When deciding on what type of vocabulary you should use you should keep in mind the formality, any specialized language and to use a variety of words. After you have developed your style your next step is to polish it. Polishing your style is important because it will make the quality of your paper. One of the tips that this chapter suggests is that you vary your sentence structure. They discuss the four basic structure and go into detail about each one. Next is to use effective transitions, these are essential to the paper because your readers need to be able to see things you are comparing, showing the differences of and when you are moving on to a whole different topic. Another key part of being able to polish your style is to be able to introduce other authors where you attained your information from. These all play into making your paper your own and helping you develop a style that you cam carry on to other papers.