

Definition of Style

Literary style refers to the language choices writers make in their work: vocabulary, use of idiom, sentence length, complexity of ideas, and so on. For example, a dictionary style might be "Coyote: a wolf like canid, Canis latrans, native to North America, distinguished by small size and slender build." On the other hand, in Roughing It, Mark Twain defines coyote as "…a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth." Although both statements are true, the writers' language choices result in different styles and prompt different reader reactions.

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