In today’s digital age, understanding how to refine your writing style is crucial. Sheehan Quirke, known as The Cultural Tutor, offers valuable insights into this topic.
The Cultural Tutor: Understanding Writing Styles
The Cultural Tutor is the online persona of Sheehan Quirke, a writer from England known for his content on art, culture, history, architecture, poetry, and philosophy.
He gained popularity with an X (formerly Twitter) account through post threads on anything from science to architectural design to art history. He also runs a weekly newsletter called Areopagus. His content could be called bite-sized classics lessons, which is probably how he took off so quickly.
Quirke started The Cultural Tutor after quitting his job at McDonald’s to focus on writing every day. He boasts over 1.7 million followers and has published a book (The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School).
Last year, Quirke sat down with David Perell to talk about writing specifically and what can be valuable about different writing styles. Let’s check out what we can learn from their discussion.
Don’t Let Technology Dictate Your Voice
The Cultural Tutor warns against letting word processors and spell-checkers homogenize writing style.
He used Shakespeare as an example.
“I copy and pasted a bit of Shakespeare into Microsoft Word. What do you think happened when I did that?”
Perell guessed correctly that the program marked the text with grammar and syntax errors.
Most of the Cultural Tutor’s advice stems from a maximalist vs. minimalist philosophy. However, screenwriting is inherently a minimalist medium. Scripts are blueprints, not finished art forms. They need to be efficient, clear, and formatted correctly so directors, actors, and crew can execute the vision.
To update this advice a little, we’d say avoid using an LLM like ChatGPT to do your writing for you. It’s going to give everyone the same ideas and suggestions, leading to a version of the homogenization Quirke bemoans in the video.
Use Contrast for Emphasis
Perell and Quirke mentioned the yin-yang symbol to explain how contrasting styles within the same work create emphasis.
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“You can have an essay that is 95% maximalism, but when you have a short paragraph, a bunch of short sentences, you get right to the point, the reader is going to see that as a sign to say, ‘Focus on this,'” Perell said. “And likewise with the opposite. You’re writing all minimalism, and then now there’s one paragraph that’s vibrant, it’s buzzing, it’s maximalist, the reader’s going to say, ‘Hey, this is important.'”
He demonstrates this with Churchill’s famous speech, showing how repetition builds to a climactic moment.
If you’re a screenwriter, you can use the same tactics in your scene description or dialogue. Guide the reader’s attention with your use of sentence structure.
Reveal something about characters in their lines—if they are typically flowery or verbose, maybe a mood change brings about blunt speech and silence.
Consider the Final Medium
Perell and Quirke have a whole discussion about the ways literature can appear in its final form—paperback vs. hardback books, with simple designs vs. ornamental leather-bound tomes, etc. They consider that, as a writer, how you want your writing to appear might influence how you approach the work from the start.
For screenwriters, this translates to considering your final medium when writing. Are you writing for intimate streaming viewing or a big-screen theatrical experience? TV or features or short films? A Netflix limited series might call for different pacing and detail than a summer blockbuster.
The final format should influence your approach. To put it broadly and way simply, writing for TV allows for more character interiority and slower builds, while standalone feature films demand more compressed storytelling. (To learn more, check out How to Write a Pilot vs. How to Write a Screenplay.)
Even within features, knowing whether it’s destined for a big screen or a vertical mobile format can affect how you construct visual sequences.
The medium is the delivery system, but it also might shape the actual writing choices you make.
