The Author’s Style

 Style is the way an author uses words, phrases, and sentences, including the point of view the author chooses to write in and the way the text is organized. FormalInformal SimplyComplex FigurativeDescriptive DetailedWordy GeneralConvoluted

 First Person  Some one in the story is telling the story from his/her point of view  Know thoughts/feelings of only 1 character  Uses words like I, me, my, we, us, etc.  Third Person Limited  A person outside the story is telling the story  Uses words like he, she, it, them, their, etc.  Know thoughts/feelings of only 1 character  Third Person Omniscient  A person outside the story is telling the story  Uses words like he, she, it, them, their, etc.  Know the thoughts and feelings of all characters in the story

Three shots like thunderclaps rang out from surround speakers in the basement rec room. A white controller jumped in Reid Anderson’s hand each time he squeezed the trigger. Tactile feedback. A speaker in the controller made snapping sounds like the action of a pistol. Reid felt this more than he heard it. The shots made his ears ring.

I witnessed the kidnapping of Betty Ann Mulvaney. Well, me and the twenty-three other people in first period Latin class at Clayton High School (student population 1,200). Unlike everybody else, however, I actually did something to try and stop it. Well, sort of. I went, “Kurt, what are you doing?” Kurt just rolled his eyes. He was all, “Relax, Jen. It’s a joke, okay?”

Aunt Harriet never meant to say any of this when Elizabeth Ann could hear, but the little girl’s ears were as sharp as little girls’ ears always are, and long before she was nine, she knew all about the opinion Aunt Harriet had of the Putneys. She did not know, to be sure, what “chores” were, but she took it confidently from Aunt Harriet’s voice that they were something very, very dreadful.

Ozma took the arm of her hostess, but Dorothy lagged behind. When at last she rejoined Glinda and Ozma in the hall, she found them talking earnestly about the condition of the people, and how to make them more happy and contented– although they were already the happiest and most contented folks in all the world. This interested Ozma, of course, but it didn’t interest Dorothy very much, so the little girl ran over to the big table on which was lying open Glinda’s Great Book of Records.

Eragon knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye. The prints told him that the deer had been in the meadow only a half hour before. Soon they would bed down. His target, a small doe with a pronounced limp in her left forefoot, was still in the herd. He was amazed she had made it so far without a wolf or a bear catching her.

 The words an author chooses to use are important:  Why use wept instead of whimpered? ▪ Wept suggests full-blown crying while whimpered is usually done before crying begins  Why use stared instead of glowered? ▪ Staring at someone or something means you are looking without much emotion. Glowered is doing the same thing but with anger included.

 Word choice comes back to connotation and denotation  Denotation is the dictionary definition of a word  Connotation is the feeling that is attached to a word (usually positive, negative, or neutral) ▪ Thin v. scrawny = both mean not heavy, but thin suggests a positive connotation while scrawny is a negative connotation meaning weak