Analyze Your Style

“The most obvious forms of clumsiness, really failures in the basic skills, include such mistakes as inappropriate or excessive use of the passive voice, inappropriate use of introductory phrases including infinite verbs, shifts in diction level or the regular use of distracting diction, lack sentence variety, lack of sentence focus, faulty rhythm, accidental rhyme, needless explanation, and careless shifts in psychic distance.” The Art of Fiction, John Gardner

We need to understand the patterns, strengths, and weaknesses in our writing style before we can correct them. Sometimes these problems are easy to fix, sometimes style issues are more subtle.
Try this: Photocopy a page from a published work from one of your favorite writers. Now copy of page of your own work, making certain that it is a polished, final draft. Compare your style against the other work, concentrating on the first 100 words if you want to figure percentages.

Circle all your verbs. What percentage of your verbs are active, or forms of “to be?”
Sentence structure. Is there a variety within your paragraphs, or do all your sentences fall into the subject-verb-object pattern? There should be a mix of compound, simple, fragments and complex structures.
Level of diction. In your first 100 words how many are two syllable, three syllable, or four or more syllables? Is this level consistent?
Modifiers. Mark all your adjectives and adverbs. Are they necessary? Are they fresh and do they add information that the noun or verb cannot provide?
Invisible modifiers. Mark your qualifiers and intensifiers-very, quite, really, completely, absolutely, simply, rather, totally, a bit, kind of, sort of, etc.
Sentence length. Draw a bar graph depicting the sentence lengths in your paragraphs. Chart at least 12 sentences. The average length of sentences runs 15-23 words. Your paragraphs should contain a variety of sentence lengths, including short sentences and fragments for emphasis. If you’re interested in figuring your average, add up all the words in ten sentences and divide by ten to arrive at that figure.
Scrutinize your punctuation. Are your commas correctly placed and have you gone over board with exclamation marks? Ask yourself if you really need dashes, colons, semicolons and parenthesis. Often they serve as barriers, not friendly road signs
Are you guilty of “little word pile-up?” How many prepositions populate your sentences? Can you replace these clauses with active verbs and nouns?
Have you used the tricks and techniques that please the readers ear: repetition, parallelism, onomatopoeia? Have you included metaphors and similes for resonance?
Alliteration. Have you deliberately repeated sounds? Circle all the HARD consonant sounds in your page (k as in kite, g as in gate, q as in quail, c as crash). Scrutinize the words in their vicinity and change adjacent or nearby words to create alliterative pairs or phrases. Try the same process on sibilant sounds (ess sounds like s in slither or z in zoo). Create slithery snakes or strive for assonance repeating vowel sounds.