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Imagery is used in literature in order to give the reader a virtual picture in his mind~the author might use the five senses to create this image. Notice the imagery in this passage from One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus:

From these cold rocks we can see the camp dogs beginning to slink back into the village to pick among the ruins for scraps of meat. The still frigid morning air bears the odors of roasted meats, spent gunpowder, scorched hides, burnt flesh. There are still dozens of soldiers about in the village so that we are unable to go back down to scavenge with the dogs, perhaps find a scrap of meat for sustenance, a flame of warmth...a blanket... 

A good author creates imagery with words~he shows, he doesn't tell. Imagery and mood can affect the way you feel about a work of literature. An author's style, though, is what helps you recognize the writing of a particular author. In literature, style is the way that something is written~it is the way it is said, not what is said. A writer's style can depend on tone, his attitude toward the subject. Style is made of such elements as sentence structure, word choice, and tone.

In his book, Teaching Grammar Through Writing, Keith Polette devotes an entire chapter to sentence structure. He teaches the writer to use different phrases and clauses to create a variety of sentence structures. In the first part of this chapter, Polette instructs the reader in writing with absolute phrases. 

An absolute phrase is a group of words~not a sentence~that usually gives more information about a noun or a pronoun. Eyes wide, mouth open, the troll stared at the third billy goat. This sentence contains an absolute phrase that is made up of a noun and an adjective (eyes wide, mouth open). 

Tell your students to look for an author's style as they read different works by one author (or they can find examples of an author's style in a single piece of text). Tell the students to choose several different sentences (ten is a good number) and analyze the sentence structure: How do they begin? How do they end? How long are they?

A fun and challenging writing activity has students write their own sentences using absolute phrases that mimic the one that you have written: Tongue dripping, tail wagging, my dog greeted me at the door as if I'd been gone for days rather than hours.

When teaching author's style, ask students to tell the difference between an abstract painting and a realistic painting. Ask them how they know a song on the radio is by Taylor Swift or Alicia Keys. Make sure that students understand that in order to know an author's style, he has to read several pieces by that author.

You will also want to point out to students that different types of genre lead to different styles of writing. Obviously poets use a completely different style than prose writers~but do they realize that H. G. Wells had a very formal style is very different from many science fiction writers today? 

Share this poem by Pablo Neruda "A Dog Has Died" with your students; discuss the style of this poem. You might want to share a poem with a completely different style and have students write a compare and contrast paper on the two different styles.

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died. 
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed 
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being.
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival 
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement;
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy 
of their shameless spirit.

There were no good-byes for my dog who has died, 
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.