Style

Every writer makes choices. What to write about. What tone to take. Which techniques to reach for, again and again, until they become a habit. Style is the name for that habit. It is the recognizable pattern of choices a writer returns to across a whole body of work, not just inside one poem or one paragraph.

This is different from voice, which you studied in Lesson 11. Voice lives inside a single piece. It is the personality you hear in one poem or one essay, built from diction, sentence rhythm, and punctuation. Style lives across many pieces. It is what lets a reader open a book they have never seen before and say, "I think I know who wrote this." A writer's voice can shift slightly from piece to piece depending on subject and mood. Their style is the thread that stays constant underneath those shifts.

Writers develop style through repetition. A writer who keeps returning to short, plainspoken sentences develops a style built on directness. A writer who keeps returning to long, winding sentences full of clauses develops a style built on accumulation. Style is not something a writer announces. It is something readers notice after encountering the same choice enough times to call it a pattern.

Tenille Campbell, a Dene and Métis writer, photographer, and artist from English River First Nation in northern Saskatchewan, offers a clear example. Across her published work and in interviews about her writing, one choice shows up again and again. She centers joy. Speaking with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 2024, when she served as the University of Saskatchewan's Indigenous Storyteller-in-Residence, Campbell said that creating joy in her work is "a natural reflection of where I grew up and who I grew up with." That is not a decision she made once for a single piece. It is a pattern she returns to across her writing, her photography, and the way she talks about her own community, where she says the people around her tell stories full of humor and context without ever thinking of themselves as storytellers. Reviewers of her poetry describe the same recurring quality using words like celebratory, wry, and bluntly honest. When a pattern shows up that consistently, across that many pieces and that many descriptions from other people, it has stopped being a coincidence. It has become a style.

Style matters because it is how a writer builds trust with a reader over time. Once you recognize a writer's style, you start to know what you are walking into before you read the first line. That expectation is powerful. A writer can meet it, or break it on purpose for effect, but either way the style has to exist first for either move to matter.

Before you read the interview with Tenille Campbell for this lesson, hold these questions in mind. What choice does Campbell say she makes again and again in her work? What do you think that repeated choice tells you about what she wants a reader to walk away feeling?