12 Chapter Twelve: Choices in Style and Words

After you have rethought your essay (probably several times) and the content and organization is working, then you can move on to thinking about the style and word choices in your writing. This is a fun part of the writing process that many overlook—it’s also where your personality comes out. You have your own unique style, your own way of speaking and communicating. Your writing style is kind of like your fingerprint—no one else has exactly the same one.

Style

What is style? Your ideas and even research are what you want to tell. Style is how you tell it.

Style has to do with things like word choice (diction), where you place words and phrases in sentences (syntax), person/pronoun use, and sentence length, structure, and order. Your writing style can, and should, change somewhat, depending on audience and purpose, but your style should still reflect you as a writer. To understand style better, take a look at this resource on the “Writing Styles of Famous Authors.”

Tone

Style is often associated with tone, and, indeed, style creates the tone. You can think of tone like in speech—your tone of voice. When speaking, you can make your meaning clear through how you say something, how you emphasize it.

Watch this quick video to see how tone of voice works (1:01)

When you’re speaking, you can make your tone pretty clear. However, when writing, you can’t rely on voice cues or body language to create tone, so you need to create it through the words you use, the construction of your ideas, and the rhythm of the sentences.

The way you put words together, the details you choose—those will set the tone of your writing. It’s a good thing to think about what kind of tone you want to use in a paper—one that will work well with your audience and purpose and your own writing style.

Sentence construction and variety

Sentences are the building blocks of most college writing, especially essays. There are many kinds of sentences: simple, compound, compound-complex. Choosing sentences can make your writing more interesting and flow better. See more about sentences in Chapter 13, Choices in Grammar Mechanics.

You should think about what your sentences communicate as well as how they sound. For example, if you only use simple sentences, you create a simple, sometimes choppy style or flow.

That explains your ideas clearly, but when you read it aloud, it sounds really stilted. It also sounds, well, simple, like your ideas are not connected.

If you combine sentences, you create more complex ideas.

That’s smoother and shows more complexity—it connects your ideas better.

You can also use a variety of styles to highlight ideas—long and short sentences together.

Combining sentences involves thinking about linking words, like coordinating conjunctions (FANBOYS) and subordinating conjunctions. School house rock “Conjunction Junction.” Different conjunctions can both create different styles, and they can give knowledge about how the ideas are related. See more about conjunctions in Chapter 13.

Pronoun/person choices and consistency

One choice to make when writing is what point of view to use. Fiction writers think about this a lot, but point of view or person is important in nonfiction or expository writing, too. How do you want to present your writing and what voice is best for your audience and purpose?

Here are some pronoun choices.

Be consistent

Whatever person you choose, be as consistent as possible in your writing. For example, if you start out in third person plural, talking about working parents/they, stick with that unless there is a clear reason to switch (like switching to first person to tell your own story about being a working parent). Be especially careful about switching to second person (you). That can be really confusing to your audience. You were talking about working parents and all the sudden, the audience is addressed directly (who, me?).

Tip: do a word search (control F in Windows) for the words you, your, yours to look for shifts.

Tense choices and consistency

Just like pronouns/person are a choice, so is tense. Are you going to tell your story in the past (what happened)? The present (what is happening)? The future (what will happen)? Each has a different feel and tone. Again, you want to be consistent. Most academic writing is written in the present or past tense.

Some tips: when writing about literature, use the present tense. Even when talking about authors who lived a zillion years ago, use present tense. Why? The literature is still alive.

For more examples and considerations, see George Mason University’s “The Three Commons Tenses Used in Academic Writing.”

As with pronouns/person, stay consistent in the tense that you choose unless there is a clear reason to change it.

Word Choices: The big picture

Although this may seem obvious, writers need to choose their words carefully. The unit of most academic writing is the sentence, but that is made of words, and words have power. As writers, you can think generally about the kinds of words you use in your writing, and specifically about the impact the words have on your audience.

Levels of Diction

Word choice in English-speak is called diction. When thinking about audience and purpose, you can also think about what level of diction is most effective.

Informal Diction

If you are writing a quick text to a friend or family member, writing a note to your roommate, or otherwise communicating with people you know well, you are probably using informal diction. It’s the regular language that you use every day with the people you know. For example, you might text your friend: OMW see ya. You don’t need to worry about writing out “On my way” or about punctuation. It’s not important to your communication. That’s super informal and can include slang, inside jokes, swearing, and more.

However, even in academic writing, you can lean toward the informal if that works for your audience and purpose. Let’s say you are writing a short informative essay for a Composition class and your audience is high school students, and your purpose is to encourage them to pursue their passions and hobbies. You can get away with more informal language, even some slang and such. You don’t want to go overboard because it’s still a college writing class, but you can and should avoid overly formal diction. Know, though, that being too informal for the situation can make you sound uneducated, like you don’t know what you are talking about.

Formal Diction

At the opposite end, you can choose formal language for your writing. If you are applying for an internship at a Fortune 500 company, writing a research paper for a professional audience, or presenting to a board or council, you would want to use formal diction. This doesn’t have to mean looking up every word in a thesaurus—it just means using clear, professional language and avoiding slang and other informal words.

Middle Diction

As the name suggests, middle diction is between informal and formal, and it’s usually the most appropriate for college writing. The goal of middle diction is to sound educated but also be clear. Most of the college writing you do with be on this level, with some being a little more informal or a little more formal.

Word choices: zooming in

When choosing words, think about what you are communicating. The average person has a vocabulary of about 30,000 words but uses less than 4% of their vocabulary each day (Curcic).

Varying words can make your writing more interesting and also communicate more. The more concrete your word choices, the more you can actually say with your words.

But there are over 50 synonyms for the verb form of walk. And each one conveys a different tone, style, meaning, and idea.

Try out some new words and see what happens. Be careful about just picking a word from a thesaurus or suggested term, though, because it might not really work.

Tip: when rethinking/revising your writing, look at your words choices and see if you can vary your words to make the writing more interesting and clear.

Figurative Language

Like using interesting words, creating interesting comparisons, or figurative language, can be effective. Metaphors and similes can make your audience see something in a new way or understand an idea more clearly.

Metaphors/similes/cliches

A simile is probably the most  popular  type of figurative language. To get the audience to understand the perspective of a college senior, you might use a simile:

That could be more effective than just saying something like

The last year of college is complicated with trying to find a job.

A metaphor is a similar comparison that leaves out the comparison words (is like, as):

Metaphors are more direct but have the same effect as long as the audience realizes they are not literal.

Unique and surprising metaphors and similes can spice up your writing and get your readers’ attention. However, often writers use overused metaphors and similes, sometimes called dead metaphors or clichés.

Any expression that seems familiar or that someone can start and you can finish is probably a cliché. Also, a cliché happens when you make an obvious connection, like roses and love. That’s an overused connection.

Try to avoid clichéd words and phrases and come up with your own! Check out a list of common clichés to be able to recognize and avoid them.

Sometimes you can really grab your reader’s attention by rewriting clichés:

Wordiness/conciseness: making the most of your words

Write an essay of 600-800 words. How many of you have used this as the guiding principle for your writing? You get to 550 words,

and then you just go back and add more words to get to 603. Well, that’s not really getting the most out of your words and it’s not communicating ideas! Almost every English teacher in the world would rather have 500 words that really communicate ideas than 800 words where 300 are just fluff. For fun, read Paul Robert’s “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words.”

Sometimes writers add this kind of fluff without meaning to. In fact, you might think you sound more academic by using certain words, phrases, or sentence constructions when really, you aren’t adding anything to the content; in fact, you might be confusing your audience.

How many of those words communicate an idea? Let’s see which ideas could be deleted without changing the meaning.

The extra words are not only unnecessary, but they are confusing. If you are writing the essay, your audience knows that all the ideas are your beliefs and opinions (unless you are using other people’s ideas and then you should cite them or you are plagiarizing).

Also, starting a sentence with “There are/there is” delays your main idea. Better to just start with the main subject of your sentence/idea. Terms like “the fact that” add words, not ideas. The last part, “learning center is utilized” is not only wordy but is passive voice, which can be confusing. Who is utilizing the learning center?

If you get rid of the extra words and rewrite the last part in active voice, you end up with something more clear and direct:

Still need more words? Add an example or a source/support. This kind of addition is more effective in the end.

Let’s try another one.

This passage uses 65 words to say what? Are all the words doing anything, or are they just taking up space?

Let’s look at the passage more closely, commenting on the words and language.

Now, we could rewrite this, being much clearer and more concise.

Now, we have 31 words to say what 65 did before—and it’s clearer. To develop the paragraphs more, we can add examples, details, and maybe even research.

Active Voice Versus Passive Voice

In the earlier example, we talked about passive voice. Passive voice, overall, is not an error. It’s a stylistic choice. The problem with passive voice is that it’s often wordy and confusing. Let’s look at this.

Active voice is when someone or something is doing something. It’s a clear action.

Passive voice is when something is being done to something or someone.

Both are technically correct; however, the active example uses fewer words and is more direct. The passive is wordier and, more problematic, many people end up leaving the end off of passive sentences.

Passive voice can also lead to grammatical errors like dangling or misplaced modifiers.

Some wordy or confusing phrases to avoid

Works Cited

Curcic, Dimitrije. “How Many Words Does the Average Person Say a Day?” Wordsrated, 7 Nov. 2023, https://wordsrated.com/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-say-a-day/.