In “Find Your Style and Voice” Sister Molly Heine writes of confidence as a writer and finding a style and voice that suits the individual, separates one’s style from the many, and creating a presence in your writing. This is also addressed in the other assigned reading, “I need you to say I” by Kate McKinney Maddalena. Both put the writer in the driver’s seat of everything, neither constraints ordered by other papers, essays, or writings, nor restrictions or rules placed by editors or professors. Though, they both mention knowing when to reel it back is very important.
I spent a long time figuring out my own writing style by reading other’s styles and imitating the ones that appealed to me. It’s kinda odd to do that, but it’s helped me a lot, actually. After doing that process I integrate everything I’ve learned into something cohesive and punchy. I had been prepared to write “impactful” but I replaced it with punchy, because I like that word a bit more for this description. It feels more rapid than heavy, the word leaves a taste in your mouth, “punchy” maybe a bloody, or juicy taste depending on what relationship you have with the original word. This is a style that I am proud of, rambling, and meticulous, something that I’ve been trying to hone more that I am in college. Using and refusing the first-person narrative has been something that I’ve been doing since high school, personal experiences influencing my narratives, essays, and research papers, even. I nearly failed every research paper because my topics were a little to close to me. Sometimes I laugh thinking about the little changes that I could have made then to get an A or a B.
I describe my style personally as writing what can’t be said. To elaborate, I like to write what people cannot say in normal conversation, or what might be difficult to convey in a cohesive manner. Recently, I have been obsessed with writing about silence, using subtext, paratext, or other things to try to describe what someone’s silence might be like in real conversation. I also like to be rambly at times (how does that go together? In very interesting ways, I tell you) sometimes I’ll spend five hundred words describing nothing. I love writing poetry as well, to chop words into their most basic forms and throw them at the reader like gunfire. English is such a wonderful language for personal writing.
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