Friday, September 30, 2011

What is the difference between genre and style?

This seems like a far more general question than one that is directed towards Romeo and Juliet, so I am going to address it more generally. A genre is a category of books, while a style is the manner in which the writer writes, rather than the content of the book.  


When I was in the eighth grade, in library class, we were taught to memorize a little passage on how books are categorized in the library. The first sentence stated that "Books are divided into fiction and non-fiction."  So, those are the two basic categories.  But there are so many sub-categories.  For example, in non-fiction, there are memoirs and biographies.  In fiction, there are science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, romances, historical novels, and so on.  Each of these is a genre, really, not all that different from how we categorize movies. 


Style is a combination of tone, word choices, syntax, and other means of expression on the part of the author that have little if anything to do with the content of the text.  Just as people have different speaking styles, some very informal and others very formal, some creating vivid imagery and some just providing the facts, writers have different writing styles that are often identifiable.

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