Elements of Style in Non-Fiction: Diction, Voice, Sentence Structure and Rhetorical Devices

Voice is the writer's personality on the page (who you hear); tone is their attitude toward the subject or reader (how they feel about it).

Any two: mounting evidence, indicates, misaligned, circadian rhythms, implications, secondary-school.

It lands like a punch: the sudden shortness mirrors the sudden emptiness and loss, and makes the reader pause.

Hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration).

Antithesis (contrasting ideas in parallel form).

A series of three parallel items; three feels complete and rhythmic, so it is memorable.

It twists a familiar phrase (present in body, not in mind) into wit, showing a clever, tired, self-aware speaker.

Word choice.

Sample: Do we really want to lose our only rink?

Deliberately making something seem smaller or less serious than it is, often for irony.

8 (Last winter, the city took the boards away.)

Anaphora.

Sample: Teens' body clocks run later than school bells. Researchers say early starts may be hurting students' marks.

Listeners can't reread, so repetition and patterns of three help them follow and remember key points.

Sample: A short winter-road season is like a store that only opens for a few weeks a year: miss it, and everything you need costs more to get.

It makes the city's choice seem self-defeating: you lose the thing that keeps you warm to save money on keeping warm. Listeners grasp the illogic instantly.

When the audience might become defensive; polite, ironic understatement lets them save face while still hearing the criticism, and it makes the speaker seem calm and reasonable (ethos).

Sample: Every summer we drove four hours north to my grandmother's cabin, where the dock leaned a little more each year and the lake smelled of pine and outboard motors. We swam until our lips turned blue, then wrapped ourselves in towels that had faded from red to pink. In the evenings she told stories while the loons called across the water and the stars came out one by one. The cabin was sold last spring. Effect: the long sentences build warmth and detail; the short last sentence delivers the loss.

The diction is concrete and personal (6:10, my brain, I'm sixteen) with a metaphor (different time zone) and contractions. The sentences are short and blunt, like a tired person talking. Together they create a voice that is witty, honest and defiant, which invites teen readers to identify and adult readers to sympathize.

Devices can manipulate when they replace evidence (for example, an emotional analogy with no facts). But they also help clarify (analogy), help listeners remember (tricolon) and express real feeling. The question is whether devices support a sound argument or disguise a weak one, which is why readers should analyse them.