7.1 It’s Not Just What You Say

It’s How You Say It

What you have to say matters. Writing is all about communicating your ideas, arguments, or perspectives with others. When we talk about thesis statements, supporting arguments, evidence, and more—that’s all about what you say.

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 can help us better recognize and understand what works for us and why.

Writing with Purpose and Audience in Mind

Over 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, 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 style might lead you to longer sentences in that context, even experimenting with semicolons or em dashes.

Writing is a series of choices—often impacted by audience and purpose—and those choices can impact the effectiveness of your message. Our goal is to be rhetorically effective in our writing, and our strategies may vary based on the particular rhetorical situation in which we find ourselves. As writers, it is a powerful tool to be able to move back and forth between stylistic modes and communication styles—the better to reach our readers.

Concise Writing

Concision is the opposite of wordiness. Concise writing is tight and bright; it is clear and content-rich. In other words, it contains no additional fluff or unnecessary words.

In the worst cases, wordiness leads to whole paragraphs of fluff and repetition. Sometimes this happens when students are asked to meet a page-length requirement for an assignment. “How can I possibly write five to six pages about this topic?” you may wonder. That’s a great question and one you could work on with your instructor—but the answer should ultimately boil down to better content, not fluff paragraphs. A few quick ideas to do that would be to add a counterargument, bring in another source, give an example, ask a more complex question, etc.

Fluff happens for a lot of reasons. Of course, reaching a word or page count is the most common motivation. Here are a few ways and reasons fluff can happen in writing:

Of course, there’s a fine line between detail and fluff. Avoiding fluff doesn’t mean always using the fewest words possible. Instead, you should occasionally ask yourself in the revision and editing process, How is this part contributing to the whole? Is this somehow building toward a bigger purpose? If the answer is no, then you need to edit.

Conciseness is an ongoing exercise for all writers. Here are a few tips to make your writing more concise:

• Remove unnecessary repetition. For example, a “slow, unhurried, leisurely stroll” could be rewritten as simply “a leisurely stroll.”
• Remove empty modifiers. Adjectives and adverbs that don’t significantly contribute to the meaning of the sentence and are used only to intensify the word they are modifying. The most common ones are very, really, pretty, totally, and just.
• Use an active voice when it makes sense to do so. More on this in the “Passive and Active Voice” section below.
• Combine sentences to avoid repetition. For example, this version is wordy: “I went to the store. The store was Winco. They were closed.” A more concise version would be “I went to Winco, but they were closed.” Notice that concise writing does not always mean short, simple sentences.

As Strunk and White in The Elements of Style says, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, and a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tells” (46).

Correctness

There is something to be said for correctness. Errors can distract readers from ideas or make meaning murky, and others may indeed judge us (again, unfairly) for errors and typos in our emails.

In the field of rhetoric and composition, though, we have moved away from a heavy emphasis on correct usage in the past few years. While there is value in correctness, the most important thing is for your meaning to be clear and your ideas to be sound. Too much focus on where the apostrophe goes can detract from the larger issues of how to build an argument, support a stance, or structure an essay. We need to work on those global aspects of writing before getting down to the nitty-gritty of comma usage.

In other words, grammar and usage are only a small part of the larger writing picture. Your instructor may note patterns of error or point out places where a comma would make your writing clearer—but it will not be the primary focus of most college writing classes.

However, when you leave school, it will be up to you to judge the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing and handle correctness accordingly. You already know this subconsciously; think again about the example of texting a friend versus emailing an instructor.

Syntax

The syntax of a sentence is how it’s arranged or how the words are put together. This isn’t just a question of correctness; the structure or order of a sentence affects how it strikes its audience.

Consider a widespread example from the well-known style guide by Strunk and White. Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” How do these rewrites change the impact of the message?

• Times like these try men’s souls.
• How trying it is to live in these times!
• These are trying times for men’s souls.
• Soulwise, these are trying times.

As you can see, sentences gain or lose power depending on how they’re structured. Longer sentences can seem more formal, but shorter sentences can be more direct and impactful in their own way. Sentences can be combined using semicolons, em dashes, and more; each method will have a slightly different “feel.”

Additionally, the length of your sentences matters. If you start every sentence with the same words, readers may get bored. If all of your sentences are short and choppy, your writing may sound unsophisticated or rushed. Some short sentences are nice though. They help readers’ brains catch up.

Tone

When you were a kid, you may have heard a grown-up say, “Don’t use that tone with me!” When someone says this, they are usually hearing something in your tone—the attitude of your voice—that they don’t like. In other words, the way you speak conveys your attitude toward the listener or the situation.

The same is true in writing. The tone is the author’s attitude toward their subject or their audience. It might be humorous, sarcastic, intimate, distanced, light, serious, warm, cold, subjective, objective, gloomy, cheerful, formal, informal, or something else. This tone comes from word choice (diction), point of view, sentence structure (syntax), and even punctuation.

Formality

The level of formality in your writing is one important element of tone. This is one of the most obvious differences between a text message and an email to your professor, as we considered above. Academic writing tends to be somewhat formal, although it should still be clear and understandable.

Formality is determined by word choice (diction) and sentence structure (syntax). In English, there are often many phrases and words that mean the same thing, but they have different connotations.

Three more simple ways to adjust the level of formality in your writing:

1. Contractions (can’t, don’t, it’s) are an informal move. You can remove them to make your writing more formal. However, this is not a strict rule! It’s a choice that you can make as a writer: How formal do you want to be? Are there times, even in academic writing, where a contraction flows better?
2. Some common transition phrases are inherently formal. Have you ever heard someone say “while this may be the case” or “therefore” in casual conversation? Only if you have very fancy friends. You can add these to boost your formality or cut them to make your writing more approachable and relatable.
3. Exclamation points are also informal. Again, they’re not forbidden in academic writing—but they are infrequent. Use them only with intention and care to highlight an important point.