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This article appeared in the Autumn 1999 edition of Short Words, the newsletter of Tim Albert Training. It was written by Wynford Hicks.

Reading up on style

Analyse the techniques you admire, says Wynford Hicks

To develop your writing style you need good models. You can find them in newspapers, specialist periodicals and books, both fiction and non-fiction. Look for writers whose tone and turn of phrase produce the effect you're looking for.

Broadsheet papers like the Guardian are uneven in the quality of their writing. Some of their journalists produce copy that is informative and entertaining, but others are better at researching stories than writing them. The Guardian often publishes clumsy, convoluted news stories with intros that go on forever.

Middle-market tabloids tend to be more consistent. Have a regular look at the Daily Mail: you will rarely see grammatical errors, convoluted sentences and sheer obscurity in its pages. This is partly because it takes sub-editing more seriously than the broadsheets.

Spend time analysing the articles you think are well written. In a news report how does the intro - the first paragraph -grab the reader's attention and tell the story in a few words? In a profile how do the quotes selected convey the personality of the person interviewed? In a feature on a specialist subject how does the writer convey technical details to the reader in a digestible form?

In looking for models, don't restrict yourself to the kind of writing that you do - or want to do - yourself. Include history, biography, novels in your reading list. And apply the same procedures to books as to articles: analyse the technique you admire.

Here, for example, is a paragraph from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, master story-teller and Nobel prize winner, whose style is famous for its apparent simplicity:

'The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone. Now alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had even seen and bigger than he had ever heard of, and his left hand was still as tight as the gripped claws of an eagle.'

Note that word 'apparent' applied to 'simplicity': here is the use of deliberate repetition (for example, 'had seen many' repeated early on), the characteristic use of 'and' (three times in the last sentence), the gradual increase in sentence length, all contributing to a rich and powerful rhythm. The paragraph ends with the simile of the eagle's claws - which stands out from the 'plainness' of the rest.

Adapted from Writing for Journalists by Wynford Hicks with Sally Adams and Harriett Gilbert, Routledge, 1999.

Five recommended books

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell - at his laconic best reporting on the Spanish Civil War.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers - a novel in powerful and poetic prose by one of the greats of the 20th century.

Brighton Rock by Graham Green - in his own words 'one of the best I ever wrote'.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - the 'new' journalist who savaged the modern novel for lack of ambition, then proved he could do better.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks - written years after the First World War but perhaps the most effective factional account of war in English.

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