One strategy for developing your own style, based on classical rhetorical exercises (such as the progymnasmata & commonplace book), is to experiment with choices that other writers have made, exploring the range of effects that you might achieve with those choices in your own contexts. Here are a few ideas to try.

Analysis: Write out several sentences from a favorite writer and then analyze their stylistic choices, trying to understand how they have achieved the effects they have. Don’t worry about technical grammatical vocabulary — just describe as best you can.

Imitation: Go one step further than the recording, by mimicking the writer’s syntax or form, but substituting your own content. For example, if the original reads, “So to study rhetoric becomes a way of studying humans” (Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps, p. 77), you might match the diction and syntax by writing “So to care for chickens becomes a way of caring for my children” or (in the spirit of bell hooks) “So to pursue education becomes a means of pursuing freedom.”

Translation: In this case, take that favorite writer’s content and rewrite it in a different form/genre, style, or code, such as changing prose to poetry, changing elevated language to slang, or even changing from one dialect to another.

Variation: Take a single sentence or common expression (from “That what’s I’M talking about” to “You’re welcome”) and generate as many variations on ways of expressing this as you can. The goal is to be exhaustive, almost like taking a word and seeing how many other words you can form by rearranging the letters. For inspiration, consider the 16th century rhetoric teacher, Desiderius Erasmus, who came up with 195 different ways of saying “Your letter pleased me greatly.” How many ways can you come up with to say something like “not if I can help it” — or whatever you want to try — across dialects, registers, genres, and styles?

Related Exercises & Resources on Style

What Is “Flow”? and/or Revising for Flow (linked exercises)

Punctuation Awareness (linked exercise)

Concision Practice (linked exercise)

Quotations Observations (linked exercise)

Stylistic Principles and Devices (linked resource)