Literary Style

Occurrence Mike Tyson once said, "My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children...", proving once again, that style is of utmost importance in our lives. At least if we want to keep our children from being eaten by crazy boxers.

Although Mr. Tyson’s views upon other things are questionable, he obviously understands the importance and meaning of style in literature. An author’s literary style dictates not only the meaning, but also the connotations that his writing attempts to carry.

Alas, writing does not have arms and is unable to carry connotations. You hand some to it, and it drops them...usually in the dog's water dish. Mike Tyson fully understands this. He is a very smart man, primarily due to a diet plentiful in rich ear-cartilage (a regal source of vitamin C).

The Official Mike Tyson Guide to Writing Paradigms of the English Vernaculars

The Plain Style

In a [1] letter to the Bubonic Plague, Mark Twain wrote:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English -- it is the modern way and the best way."

That advice stands firm today. That advice has legs; four legs. In 127 years that advice has not sat down once.

Kate Bush commented, "I pay for my books, not by the number of pages but by the number of full-stops. Descriptive language is a cancer, ripping off the sentence-conscious consumer."

Papa Hemmie understood the value of plain language. Most of his greatest works used short clear sentences. He said that writing should be as transparent as a trout stream in which the reader wades. But the reader has to watch out or he might slip on a mossy adjective and get sucked under a verbal logjam. Or he might get the rhetorical point of a literary fish hook stuck in the ball of his thumb.

But now we have moved on to literary metaphor.

The Metaphorical Style

A writer who uses metaphor is like a recently-fed python with the wings of an eagle (this as a simile). We will get back to this admittedly startling comparison in a moment, but first we should call to your attention the five essential commandments in the bible of metaphorical writing.

1. Even the widest wings of simile cannot make fat prose soar.
2. A dead analogy may not gallop, but it does draw flies. And you can make glue from its hooves!
3. A simile is to a metaphor as a violet is to a frozen chicken: neither will clean your bathtub.
4. In Norway a fiord is often a metaphor for something else.
5. Never give the guns of simile to the ducks of metaphor. Or to the hippopotamuses of analogy.

Now then, do you remember that bit about the python with eagle's wings?

So do we.

The Shakespearean Style

O sweetest dross, that acrost the stage doth flow,

that all anonce the greenest scribe may throw:

verse trivial, strainéd drivel, most uncouth,

springing, wingéd like a python, from actor's mouth.

Need we say more?

Stream of Consciousness

OK, the difficult part of stream-of-consciousness writing is how your unconscious...we mean your subconscious -- keeps messing up the punctuation and just spilled beer all over our keyboard, but soon it will be time to go to bed anyway -- as we are writing this at 2200 hrs local time, as measured at the bottom of the Mariana Trench where time slows down because of the relativistic effects of intense pressure!

That's why you go fishing but never catch any fish.

Sonorous Style

To write in well-rounded and sonorous-sounding phrases one must balance alliteration with illiteration, rhythm with rhyme; and one must use semicolons. Indeed, semicolons are the champagne of punctuation; far superior to the flimflam and hashbegorrah of dashes -- useful though dashes are -- and, of course, the common and even all too common comma.

Speak to us not of the ellipsis and of parentheses; such are the tools of the merest hack. Forswear them!

Romantic Style

Romantic Literature is perhaps the hardest or even maybe the easiest of literary skillz to master. It requires letters to form words and full-stops to end sentences like most other styles, but what it also requires is an author, who whilst holding their pen, caresses their vulnerability. Many an author, in the preparation for the creation of romantic prose, has told someone of considerable higher attractiveness than themselves, that they want to spank them hard and call them mummy. The response to this request provides one's self with a weeping sorrowful heart and a ready wit to step carefully over the stones of human relationships.

Practical example

Here's a romantic passage I wrote with no preparation:

"I fancied her. She'd definitely get it. She was blonde."

And here's that passage rewritten after performing my pre-prose exercise. I asked that dirty looking burd in the Off-License if I could have a quick squeeze of her left and best breast. Then I wrote:

"My feelings unbounded, I stood motionless, stunned as her delicate face started drowning into her warm green eyes. Her hair wandered slowly down her shoulders with a tired and restless abandon."

Meme Style

Founded in 1,000,000 BC by unholy sex between Oprah and Mr. T, this style is used by the Ruler of the Universe, Chuck Norris, when he roundhouse-kicks God right in His oysters. It must include an utterly bogus Oscar Wilde quote, something Wilde would never in a bajillion years have said.

“Hot damn my baby you is done caused me to run my Olds 88 right over Snoop Dogg, niggah!”

~ Oscar Wilde on his inguinal hernia

After huffing 13 kittens and going bat fuck insane, the writer using this style will be banned by Famine and we will all breathe a sigh of relief.

Template Style

This article documents an event that you have missed. You may have to time travel to experience it.

ETPHelp end hunger! Eat the poor!

 

Another nugget of wisdom from Famous Doble Dichos: "It takes a brave man to admit he's a sniveling coward, Pilgrim."

	Ŧĥīš ǻŕţǐċĺə įŝ ţǿŧāľŀŷ ìñçôмþŕéħėʼnşıßľě.
	Ÿǿü čǽñ ħëłþ Ǜʼnçýċļöþęđĩä ßŷ ểǻŧıʼnġ ä çåŗǐβöǚ.

Playstation Style

It is important in Video Game Literature for the author to be disparaging about any Gaming Computer Machine System they do not own. For example the owner of an 'X-Box Three Six Zero', must defend it against his perceived evil of what is called the 'Playstation three'. "X-Box 360 pwns Playstation 3 cause it's has sooooo much better graphics rendering power for long gloomy corridors.." See how the word 'pwns'is used instead of "is better than" and "graphics" replaces "picture drawn on the screen". Notice also in this form of literacy, there is no limit on the number of o's put in the word 'so', the bane of many a writer using a different writing style.

Triumph Over Adversity Style

So exemplified by the marvellous and brave Frank McCourt, churn out the pain of your childhood in giant grey chunks of misery. Swim around your reflections of an alcoholic father, a mother too ill to use multi-syllable words, and brothers and sisters who's birth facilitates only their deaths from malnutrition, neglect and damp.

But from this dirge of existence you'll look fondly on the good times: Coming across a rock shaped like a car or finding a shilling in a bit of old-man's shit. That time when Dad came home slightly less drunk and built a cricket bat out of an old beer bottle or when mum went to church and dug up a protestant to make e a very generously sized casserole.

Now you're an adult, you're a teacher or a human rights lawyer. So there's hope; hope ejaculating hard from the cock of childhood poverty, covering us all, in sticky white opportunity.

Colloquial Style

Well, you know how it is: you sit down and start in to typing. Pretty soon your coffee is cold and your beer is warm, it's 2007, and your cat has croaked.

You've been working on the same Uncyclopedia article for 7 months. Your butt flesh has grown onto the seat of your chair.

Damn, Bubba! You gotta get out of the house!

That's where fishing comes in. Fishing provides men and women the excuse they need to get the hell out of town; fiddle with macho things like bobbers, rooster tails, crankbaits, pickaninnies, and fake worms; and finally get howling drunk and fall into large or small bodies of water.

Then you can come home and write an Uncyclopedia article about it.