7.1 Writing Style

We’re now shifting focus from what you say to how you say it. While style often develops naturally over time, understanding its key elements can help you recognize what works for you and why.

Writing with your Audience in Mind

College students write in many different genres; lab reports, essays, emails, even texts, and each requires a different approach. A lab report is objective and concise, often avoiding “I,” while a personal essay is more subjective, using first person and descriptive language. The way you write changes based on your audience and purpose.

Writing is a series of choices, and those choices shape how effective your message is. Strong writers adapt their style to fit the situation, moving between different approaches as needed. This flexibility helps you communicate more clearly and connect with your readers.

At the same time, your writing should reflect your unique voice, your word choice, sentence structure, and tone. Developing that voice takes practice, but the goal is to balance your personal style with the expectations of the assignment or genre.

Passive and Active Voice

In passive voice, the object (or recipient) of the action becomes the subject of the sentence. In other words, the focus is on who (or what) received the action rather than on who (or what) completed the action. Here’s an example to show you what I mean:

• Passive: The coffee was drunk by Poppy.
• Active: Poppy drank the coffee.

Both of these sentences are grammatically correct, but as you can see, they have some notable differences. The passive construction is a little longer, and it emphasizes the coffee (the recipient of the action) rather than Poppy (the doer of the action). The active version is more concise, and it focuses on Poppy and her actions.

These may seem like small differences, but they add up throughout a paper. Active voice is often considered sharper, clearer, and cleaner than passive voice. In the example above, you can see why.

So why would anyone ever use passive voice? Well, in some cases, the doer of the action is unknown or irrelevant, as in “The package was delivered this morning” (passive). We don’t know who delivered it, and while the delivery person matters as a human, they don’t matter in the meaning of this sentence.

In other cases, the receiver of the action is more important than the doer; we emphasize the recipient of the action because that’s what matters in the context of the sentence. For example, we almost always say, “She was born in 1994,” which is a passive construction. In this situation, who did the action (her mother) is not the most relevant information. If we wrote, “Her mother gave birth to her in 1994” (active voice), we would be making a conscious decision to highlight her mother’s role at the moment.

This is often true in technical and scientific writing as well, which is why the passive voice is more common in STEM fields. In a lab report, for example, the experiment is more important than the researcher; for that reason, it’s common to write in a passive voice. For example, “Hydrochloric acid was then added” (passive) is more common than “I added hydrochloric acid.”

We also often use passive voice to avoid blaming others in a negative situation. In some cases, this is considered the politest route. It may feel accusatory or aggressive to say, “You did this assignment incorrectly” (active). Instead, we might say, “This assignment was done incorrectly.” Again, both are correct, but we can make a writerly choice here to focus on the receiver of the action (the assignment) and in this case spare someone’s feelings.

However, be careful! The passive voice is sometimes used in this way to avoid taking responsibility. Newspapers famously use passive voice in a way that emphasizes the victims rather than the criminals. Politicians, corporations, and regular people also use the passive voice to duck blame or responsibility. For example, “Mistakes were made” (passive) versus “We made a mistake” (Or even more unthinkable: I made a mistake) (active).

Passive voice isn’t grammatically incorrect, and it has its place. The key (as with all elements of style) is to consider how its use impacts your writing. Notice it and choose when to use it and when to cut it.

You can check your writing for passive voice. Does the “doer” of the action come after the action (the thing that was done)? Or does the doer disappear completely? If so, the sentence is likely in passive voice. You can also look for this construction in your sentences:

• “to be” verb (is, are, was, etc.) + past participle (walked, taken, seen, etc.) = passive voice

Point of View

Many of your college instructors will ask you to write in the third person only and will want you to avoid first or second person. One important reason is that third person point of view focuses on a person or topic outside yourself or the reader, making it the most professional, academic, and objective way to write. The goal of third person point of view is to remove personal, subjective bias from your writing, at least in theory. Most of the writing you will do in college will require you to focus on ideas, people, and issues outside yourself, so third person will be the most appropriate. This point of view also helps your readers stay focused on the topic instead of thinking about you or themselves.

• First person uses the following pronouns: I, me, my, us, we, myself, our, ours…. Any words that include the speaker/writer turn the sentence into first person.
• Second person uses any form of the word “you,” which has the effect of addressing the reader.
• Third person uses pronouns like he, she, it, they, them…. Any words that direct the reader to a person or thing that is not the writer or reader turn the sentence into the third person.

The point of view you choose to write in will depend on your audience and purpose. If your goal is to relate to your audience in a personal way about a topic that you have experience with, then it may be appropriate to use first person point of view to share your experience and connect with your audience.

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.

To “I” or Not to “I”

As a general rule, an “I” voice will give your writing a more personal and subjective feel. That’s why a first-person perspective is common in memoirs and personal essays but rarely seen in STEM fields (although some scientific articles do refer to the researchers as “we,” which is a personal pronoun but somehow slightly less intimate than “I”). Academic writing in the humanities and social sciences is somewhere in between these two extremes—depending on the subject and context, a writer can make their own choice. Many well-known scholars in these fields use an “I” in their academic papers, especially if their connection to the subject is important to understanding their perspective or point. Some authors use it just a little bit, maybe they open their article with a personal anecdote before moving into a more objective tone, while others use it throughout a piece of writing.

It’s worth noting that although writing without the “I” can be read as more objective, all writing is created by people with perspectives and stances. If I make an argument, it doesn’t matter if I frame it with “I argue” or not; it’s still my argument. From one perspective, then, using an “I” voice is simply more transparent about the subjectivity of the work.