Style and Tone

Closely linked to audience is the concept of style and tone. You will recall that we have said we adopt different ways of talking, or writing, depending on the audience we find ourselves addressing. A major part of this adaptation involves our perception of style and tone. For example, when we discussed dealing with different levels of "formality" in offering a proposal, we said that we are likely to make radical changes in our approaches: casual in dealing with coworkers, formal in dealing with corporate "agents." Obviously, we have a fairly well-considered spectrum of behaviors in mind. How do we make decisions about using these behaviors in our communication efforts?

In an earlier lecture, I invited you to think about audience: who you thought was being addressed and what techniques the author used for various audiences. This week's discussion focuses more on writing style and formality of tone. You might want to consider such aspects of style and tone as:

• technical terms, jargon, and abbreviations (or acronyms) imply a command of a specific professional vocabulary (limited audience);
• defined terminology (of all kinds) and relatively common words imply a more general audience;
• an identifiable, and expected, structure (as in a proposal or scientific protocol) implies a specialized audience);
• a general discussion of a topic implies a general audience;
• a text that addresses the reader directly ("As you can see...") versus one that seems to lack an authoring agent ("The results indicate that...") provides some evidence of the authoring agents attitude and sense of responsibility;
• a text that fails to directly address issues, or lacks support (for sources) also provides some clues about authorial intention;
• the presence, or lack, of visual elements also help determine expected audience and purpose.

In thinking about style and tone you should remember that the decisions you make about these two communication elements determine, indeed control, the membership of your potential audience. If you are producing a document for a professional community that has command of a specific vocabulary and, perhaps, symbology (scientific or mathematical symbols, for instance), then you should feel free to employ these techniques. On the other hand, a text, on even a similar topic, destined for a general audience would eschew (how's that for an odd word?) these same techniques.

 Websites

 
NASA: Addressing different audiences  (supplements "Five Audiences ..." website given on audience lecture website, providing some different audiences and some additional advice for targeting general audiences)

Writers' Workshop    BTW -- You can find other resources for writing at the Writers' Workshop website.