Style Exercise #5

            The elements of style apparent in this piece create a narrative that is awkward in the sense that it is both clumsily or unskillfully written, and, at the same time, requiring great tact, ingenuity, skill, and discretion.  The piece is clumsy, for one, because of the opening sentence.  A writer is supposed to demonstrate good writing skills in all ways possible, and the writer of this entry goes out of his way to say that he isn’t a skilled writer, where he admits he isn’t “…used to writing.”  Then he admits that the passage is “badly written.”  He also puts forth too much effort discussing things that don’t apply to the story of the narrative and the elements of plot, and he spends too much time writing about how he is unsure of himself as a writer, and how he only wants to be a good writer. 

            Although this is true, there is a distinct level of skill shown by the writer.  It’s interesting how at the end of the story he points out to the reader that the ending of the story, the “transition,” is most important, but he never actually gets to the end of the story, so that the reader is left wondering what happened.  “I’d rather stop here” is an interesting choice for a final sentence because it associates the writer with the reader; it initiates a relationship between the writer and the reader.  This is unique form of metadiscourse. 

            The writer shows good and bad skills at the same time where he incorporates his own comments, like, “So what,” “Huh, that’s not bad,” and “That’s a good one.”  All of this may be read as unnecessary, but it is effective in setting the tone as very consultative and informal, maybe the most informal passage of the book.  The writer creates an assumed audience that takes on this unusually informal style.