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Hybrid Styles of Writing
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Exercise:
Try to fashion a piece of writing that combines two (or more) genres previously
used. Try to juxtapose two distinctly different styles e.g. the descriptive manual and
humour; taboo and travel; autobiography and film/book review. Make sure to explicitly
state in the Subject of your BBS post, what the two genres are.
A hybrid style is basically a style which combines two or more 'edgy' genres in order
to come up with a combination genre. This juxtaposition of two or more styles sheds
a sensational light on the topic of interest.
If you think about it, many of the innovators of modern writing employed some kind of
hybrid style or another. Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Tom Woolf, and Brett Easton
Ellis all wrote fiction, but changed the status quo significantly enough to create a
new style of prose. Literary journalism is in fact a combination of the straight article
with the short story; D.H. Lawrence wrote using fiction but also stream of consciousness
more typical of an autobiographic diary entry. Dylan Thomas' prose writing is so much
like poetry. Brett Easton Ellis' work reminds me of documentary script writing with a
twist. If you have elected to be assessed by 'performance' then you will be producing
writing that has elements of theatre, broadcast radio and/or multimedia. Hybrid forms of writing
should not be too unfamiliar to any of us.
In the last 20 years, the Post-modernists have created a new kind of critical writing,
literary criticism, which is part fiction/part documentary/part critical review.
Some links to hybrid writing on the Web: