Chapter
Tinkering with your document’s style to ensure that it meets the demands of your audience comes next in the process. Among the most important skills in communication is to adjust your style according to the audience to meet their needs as well as your own. You would speak differently to a customer or manager compared with how you would to a long-time co-worker who has also become a friend. In each case, these audiences have certain expectations about your style of communication, and you must meet those expectations to be respected and maintain good relations. This section reviews those style choices and focuses especially on the six major characteristics of strong writing common to both formal and casual writing.
- The Formality Spectrums
- The Six Cs of Style
The Formality Spectrum
We began looking at the general choice between a formal and informal style of writing based on how you’ve profiled your audience’s position in relation to you. We have seen how certain situations call for formal writing and others for a more relaxed style. We also learned that these styles involve word choices along a spectrum of synonyms from “slangy” to casual to fancy. Here we will review those considerations in the context of the writing process.
Formal Style in Writing
Within the English field, formal standardized English has had the connotation of carrying favor with audiences, such as those outside your organization, those higher than you within your organization, and those on or around your level whom you have never communicated with before. These audiences can include managers, customers, clients, suppliers and vendors, regulators, and other interested stakeholders such as government agencies. A cover letter, for instance, will be read by a future potential manager probably unfamiliar to you, so it is a very real test of your ability to write formally—a test that is crucial to your career success. Many common professional document types also require formality, such as other letters, memos, reports, proposals, agreements, and contracts. In such cases, you are expected to follow grammatical rules more strictly and make slightly elevated word choices, but not so elevated that you force your reader to look up rarely used words.
Writing in what has been the accepted style can require effort because grammar must be tighter, and the vocabulary is sometimes advanced. However, at the drafting stage you should, in the interests of speed-writing to get your ideas down nearly as fast as they come, go with the word that comes to mind and leave the synonym-finding efforts for the editing stage. Strictly maintaining a formal style in all situations would also be your downfall, however, because flexibility is also expected depending on the situation. It is also important to note that standardized written English is not the only means of communication that can signal professionalism or scholarship and that using your own dialects, slang, and languages is equally as vi