Leif Enger's prose in Peace Like a River has a distinctive quality, blending plain, unadorned rural vocabulary with occasional moments of heightened, almost lyrical language, particularly around the novel's miraculous events, which makes it an unusually effective text for teaching students how to analyze an author's style at the sentence level rather than only at the level of plot or theme. Many students have practiced thematic analysis extensively but have far less experience with the more granular skill of examining specific word choices, sentence rhythms, and syntax to understand how style itself contributes to a text's overall effect and meaning.

A useful starting exercise asks students to select two passages, one describing an ordinary, everyday moment and one describing a moment of heightened significance or apparent miracle, and to compare the sentence length, vocabulary level, and overall rhythm between the two. Students who complete this comparison often notice that Enger's sentences grow longer, more rhythmic, and more reliant on figurative language during the novel's more extraordinary moments, while his prose during ordinary domestic scenes tends toward shorter, plainer, more concrete language, a stylistic pattern worth naming explicitly and testing against additional passages before students draw a broader conclusion.

It helps to introduce students to specific vocabulary for discussing style, including terms like diction, syntax, and register, before asking them to apply these concepts independently, since students often notice stylistic effects intuitively but lack the precise vocabulary to name and discuss what they are noticing with real analytical precision. A brief glossary handout, paired with examples drawn directly from the novel for each term, gives students a shared vocabulary the whole class can use during discussion, which considerably improves the precision and clarity of both spoken discussion and eventual written analysis on this topic.

Connecting Style to Narrative Voice

Because Reuben narrates the entire novel, questions of style and questions of narrative voice are closely intertwined in ways worth making explicit for students, since Enger's specific stylistic choices are also, simultaneously, choices about how to render a particular character's retrospective voice convincingly on the page. Asking students to consider what Enger's stylistic choices suggest about Reuben specifically, such as whether his tendency toward plain, concrete language reflects his rural upbringing or his occasional lyrical flights suggest something about how he processes his family's more extraordinary experiences, connects this style-focused unit back to the character and narration work students have likely already done elsewhere in the broader novel study.

• Compare sentence rhythm and vocabulary in ordinary versus extraordinary passages.
• Introduce precise vocabulary: diction, syntax, and register, with novel-specific examples.
• Connect stylistic shifts to what they reveal about Reuben as narrator.
• Ask students to imitate a specific stylistic pattern in a short original passage.
• Discuss how style shifts when Swede's western excerpts interrupt the main narration.

Using Imitation as an Analytical Tool

A particularly effective way to deepen students' understanding of Enger's style is asking them to attempt a short imitation exercise, writing a brief original passage that consciously imitates a specific stylistic pattern they have identified in the novel, such as the shift toward longer, more rhythmic sentences during moments of heightened significance. This kind of imitation exercise, sometimes underused in literature classrooms compared to purely analytical writing, forces students to internalize stylistic patterns at a level of detail that analytical description alone often does not achieve, since successfully imitating a style requires noticing details a student might otherwise describe only in vague, general terms.

After completing the imitation exercise, asking students to write a brief reflection explaining which specific stylistic choices they made and why, connecting each choice back to a specific pattern they observed in Enger's prose, turns the creative exercise back into an analytical one, giving the teacher a clear way to assess whether the imitation reflects genuine stylistic understanding or a more superficial, surface-level attempt. This combination of creative practice and explicit reflection tends to produce a deeper and more durable understanding of style analysis than either a purely analytical essay or a purely creative imitation exercise would achieve on its own.

Writing and Grading a Style Analysis Essay

An essay prompt asking students to argue how a specific stylistic pattern, such as the shift between plain and lyrical language, contributes to a specific effect, such as heightening the sense of wonder surrounding the novel's miracles, gives students a genuine analytical task grounded in concrete, specific textual evidence rather than the vaguer, more subjective territory that style analysis can sometimes drift into without careful prompt design. A rubric for this essay should specifically reward precise identification of stylistic devices, using accurate terminology, alongside clear explanation of the specific effect each device produces, distinguishing this kind of essay clearly from a thematic essay that happens to mention style only in passing without genuine sentence-level analysis.

Grading style analysis essays requires the teacher to verify that a student's claims about specific stylistic patterns are actually accurate, which means this kind of essay benefits from a teacher's own close, recent rereading of the specific passages students are likely to cite, since inaccurate claims about sentence length or vocabulary level can otherwise slip past a grader working from general impression rather than careful verification. This close verification requirement makes style analysis essays somewhat more demanding to grade than more purely thematic essays, but the resulting feedback tends to be considerably more precise and useful for students working to develop this genuinely valuable and often underdeveloped analytical skill.