As a birthday gift to my wife, I released this website on her birthday and uploaded the articles that I had written already. I asked my wife to read them and give me feedback. Personally, I would have rated them in the order of:

• What makes you, you?
• Forgetting "forgive and forget"
• Discovering the joy of writing

But to my utter surprise, she rated them as:

• Discovering the joy of writing
• Forgetting "forgive and forget"
• What makes you, you?

Discovering the joy of writing was my first article and I had written it without a very clear mind and without much purpose. For the other 2 articles, on the other hand, I had done quite some research and had taken sufficient time to write and rewrite them. How was it, then, that my wife liked Discovering the joy of writing the most? I asked her and she told me that she liked writings (articles, novels, etc) that talked to her. Discovering the joy of writing did just that. Forgetting "forgive and forget" and What makes you, you?, however, are, what she calls, gyaan sessions, i.e. "boring".

I thought, that if I am to write, I should understand the different styles of writing. And I am not talking here about grammar, but the different genres, if you will, of writing. I thought about it a lot and the following are the different styles that I could recognize:

• Imagination: Novels, poems fall into this category.
• Reporting: This is mostly laying down the facts about an event or incident.
• Contemplation: In this style, the writer has thought over and pondered about something and is writing his learnings about that topic.
• Share: Sometimes you find out something interesting or clever, most probably in your domain of work, and you want to share it with your friends and/or the community at large. You also want to note it down somewhere where it is easy to find it later if you need. Many people use personal blogs to accomplish this.

I am sure there will be many more styles. But these are the ones that I could think of. While enumerating them, I also realized that there are multiple axes across which writing styles could be calibrated. I can think about only two right now: the one above, and the "talking" versus "boring" that started this whole train of thought. However, I think that some combinations are more compatible with each other than others. For example, "Imagination" goes well with "talking", whereas "Reporting" goes well with "boring" ;)

Of course, as a budding writer, I have to realize that I cannot be good at all styles, and neither do all people like to read all styles. So it is not possible to please everyone, and that is OK. What I have to do is to try my hands at various styles, figure out what I am most comfortable at, get feedback, and improve!

So to start off, I thought of doing an experiment. I decided to write this article in the "talk" style that my wife had told me earlier. It seems to be on the "contemplation" point on the other axis. Through this experiment, I want to find out whether I have the ability or knack of writing in this style and also see what are the views and opinions of my readers. It is for this reason that you will find no links pointing out to wikipedia or other sites from this article. It is all my thoughts, and my thoughts only :)

Fortunately, I think that I have figured out the key to success. It"s "curiosity". It is the one thing that cuts across all barriers and all axes. It is curiosity, of any form, and in any domain, that makes us humans. I am sure, you must be curious that where I have used the curiosity factor in this article. Guess? Well, it is the "title" of this article: "writing flavors". Did you not think that flavors are associated with taste, not writing. You must have guessed that this article would either be about some recipe or about writing recipes on blogs or somewhere. But then the summary of the article should tell you that that is not the case. So now you want to know what the article is really about, and that is what brought you till here!

So what do you think? Does this flavor suit me well?