My Love for Style
by Rose Rutzen
Imagine a 5’3 Hispanic girl wearing old faded jeans, not from intentional distress but from kneeling on asphalt and dirt petting dogs and stomping through mud, an oversized sweater to hide deep-seated insecurities and a life’s accumulation of black T-shirts, and an extremely-worn pair of Chucks converse, in varying shades of what the Hell did I step in?!
This is me.
The way I present says a lot about me, and often serves as a base for first impressions… in my experience, often concerned impressions... But it doesn’t bother me too much because it makes me, well, me.
My Style is weird, and that’s saying more than how I dress. I’ve been writing for a very long time, however, it wasn’t until recently that I really started thinking about how I write and why I write this way. I’ve always thought that the way I talk is the way I should write, but that’s not easy to standardize, so schools teach language a little differently. Teachers have always told me that I need to adjust my tone and voice, or I need to follow the format, and everything I write has to fit neatly into an organized 5-paragraph essay and— basically boring and robotic.
Something about this advice always stuck out to me— if I am the person writing, why should I write with someone else’s voice and style?
Style can mean a lot of things, be it how someone dresses, writes, draws, works, even exists. And everyone’s style is unique specifically to them, it’s the way people see and interact with the world and the things around them. The most important thing about interjecting writing with style is to be yourself, which Kurt Vonnegut exemplifies in his piece, How to write with style. He explained, “The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard as a child” . Well, I was raised by a strong Hispanic matriarch and a stoic Russian Ironworker… yeah. So, I find it apropos that I have such a unique style of talking and writing.
People have told me that they can’t quite pin where my accent comes from, which makes me laugh because I’m the most culturally-removed second generation Dominican/ Russian in the Chicago suburbs. Probably. Sure, I was raised with some Hispanic culture, the food we ate, the fast pace we talked at, even how we walked, but after 5-6 years old, I was only speaking English. The early years of my life were bilingual, but once I entered kindergarten, I mostly only heard English and I wasn’t taught to read or write in Spanish until the 6th grade. This background really makes me wonder where exactly my style could’ve come from; does it echo the speech I heard as a child. Vonnegut might have something going for him here, but I think there’s more to it.
Parts of style are both inherent and developed. The way you speak and write is naturally “you”, but as you develop your personality, your style develops as well. For example, last year I had a rather rough time in school after my mom passed away in March, and it had a big impact on my writing. My once very outspoken and comical writing style became more subdued, cynical and well… sad. I was emotionally unstable and the way I wrote was directly affected. I cared less about tone and audience, and all formality fell through to colloquial ranting.
My argumentative pieces became me arguing with the readers, vehemently bent on convincing them they were wrong, instead of offering a different viewpoint; really I think I was mad at myself. As my grades fell because of my new less-than-improved style, my attitude worsened, and thus I fell into a vicious self-mutilating cycle of style death. I wondered if my true style would ever return or if my writing would be permanently jaded.
After time and a summer of essentially living as an urban farmer, tending to a menagerie of dogs, birds, and rodents and a jungle of heirloom tomatoes and Japanese peppers… I slowly came to realize that style is a lot like life, ever-evolving and full of hardships and overcoming. Don’t ask how I got THAT from THAT, it just worked out somehow. As you develop your character as a person, your style of writing will reflect. It flows and changes over time as we grow. Now, I write more contemplatively and I often will go off on tangents chock full of metaphors, that eventually lead back to my original point. Essentially, I use my verbiage and love for symbolism as strengths in my writing, and just go with the flow instead of trying to change myself and the way I write.
My relationship with writing has been long and trying, but it is loving nonetheless. It will continue to mature and evolve as I grow and change as a person and face different hardships, and my style will change with me. What started as a simple quote from Kurt Vonnegut has become an unusual narrative of how I learned to write the way I do, and what has shaped my style. Most importantly, it’s crucial to remember that style is simply one’s way of doing something, and that will be unique and a different experience for every person.
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