26 It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It
26 It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It
Style as a Series of Choices
Liz Delf
What you have to say matters. Writing is all about communicating your ideas, argument, or perspective with others. When we talk about thesis statements, supporting arguments, evidence, exigency, and more—that’s all about what you say.
In this chapter, though, we are going to shift away from what you have to say to how you say it. Style is something that many writers develop on their own over time, but giving language to the different elements of style—as we will do in this chapter—can help us better recognize and understand what works for us and why.
How to Decide
Purpose, Audience, Context
Over the course of your day as a college student, you might write a lab report, a personal essay, an email to a professor, and a bunch of texts to your roommate. As a writer, you know instinctively that these different categories (or genres) of writing require different approaches. The content is varied, yes, but how you write is also distinct in each case.
A lab report is objective, is fact based, and often uses passive voice with no “I”; its sentences may be short, clear, and direct. A personal narrative, on the other hand, almost certainly uses an active “I” voice and potentially more adjectives and sensory language. Your personal style might lead you to longer sentences in that context, even experimenting with semicolons or em dashes.
You can imagine similar (or even more pronounced) differences between an email to a professor and a text to your roommate. How does your voice or style change between the two contexts? How do you adapt your vocabulary, formality, punctuation, and more to fit each situation? What’s the problem with sending an email filled with emojis and no caps to your professor? They might get your meaning, but an email like that might also (perhaps unfairly) reduce your credibility with that particular audience. When we think about how to write something, the most important thing to consider is who will read it and why. In other words, read the room, people.
And that brings us to an important point: how you write or speak in your community might be very different from the expectations of academic writing. This extends beyond just emojis; depending on your family and history, you may use a different system of grammar, syntax, and dialect than what is sometimes called “standard” English. That’s OK! We don’t want to change who you are or how you speak with your family or friends.
For example, Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young argues that the college writing classroom’s focus on standardized English reveals a prejudice against Black and other nonwhite dialects and privileges white language practices (110–111). Dr. Asao Inoue argues that traditional writing assessment (which emphasizes “correctness”) ignores students’ experiences and leads to a racist writing classroom with inequitable outcomes (52–53). For these reasons—among others—there is a move within rhetori