Style and Word Choice

Words matter—and those you choose will define the style of your arguments.

For most academic arguments, what is called formal or professional style is appropriate. Such language sounds weighty because it usually is. It is not shy about employing highbrow terms, conventional vocabulary, or technical language because that’s what readers of academic journals or serious magazines and newspapers expect. Formal writing typically avoids contractions, phrases that mimic speech, and sometimes even the pronoun I. But what may be most remarkable about the style is how little it draws attention to itself — and that’s usually deliberate. Here’s a levelheaded paragraph from the Economist arguing that digital education may yet have a huge impact on colleges and universities:

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So demand for education will grow. Who will meet it? Universities face a new competitor in the form of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These digitally-delivered courses, which teach students via the web or tablet apps, have big advantages over their established rivals. With low startup costs and powerful economies of scale, online courses dramatically lower the price of learning and widen access to it, by removing the need for students to be taught at set times or places. The low cost of providing courses — creating a new one costs about $70,000 — means they can be sold cheaply, or even given away. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School considers MOOCs a potent “disruptive technology” that will kill off many inefficient universities. “Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities [in America] will be in bankruptcy,” he predicted last year.

— “The Future of Universities: The Digital Degree”

The editors assume that readers of the Economist will understand technical terms such as “startup costs” and “economies of scale,” though they do pause to explain “MOOCs” — a much-hyped innovation yet to catch on. Even as it delivers what seems like bad news for universities, the paragraph is efficient and cool in tone — modeling a style you’ll often use in academic projects.

Colloquial words and phrases, slang, and even first- and second-person pronouns (I, me, we, you) can create relationships with audiences that feel much more intimate. When you use everyday language in arguments, readers are more likely to identify with you personally and, possibly, with the ideas you represent or advocate. In effect, such vocabulary choices lessen the distance between you and readers.

Admittedly, some colloquial terms simply bewilder readers not tuned in to them. A movie review in Rolling Stone or a music review in Spin might leave your parents (or some authors) scratching their heads. Jon Dolan, for example, has this to say about Drake’s song “Draft Day”:

Drake’s latest statement-of-Drakeness casually big-ups his sports bros Johnny Manziel and Andrew Wiggins over a dreamy sample of Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing),” then drops a little Jennifer Lawrence fan fic: “On some Hunger Games sh–t/I would die for my district.” It’s baller brio with a characteristic light touch. May the odds be ever in your favor, son!

— Jon Dolan, Rolling Stone, “Drake, ‘Draft Day’ ”

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Huh, we say. But you probably get it.

Be alert, too, to the use of jargon, the special vocabulary of members of a profession, trade, or field. Although jargon serves as shorthand for experts, it can alienate readers who don’t recognize technical words or acronyms.

Another verbal key to an argument’s style is its control of connotation, the associations that surround many words. Consider the straightforward connotative differences among the following three statements:

Students from the Labor Action Committee (LAC) carried out a hunger strike to call attention to the below-minimum wages that are being paid to campus temporary workers, saying, “The university must pay a living wage to all its workers.”

Left-wing agitators and radicals tried to use self-induced starvation to stampede the university into caving in to their demands.

Champions of human rights put their bodies on the line to protest the university’s tightfisted policy of paying temporary workers scandalously low wages.

The style of the first sentence is the most neutral, presenting facts and offering a quotation from one of the students. The second sentence uses loaded terms like “agitators,” “radicals,” and “stampede” to create a negative image of this event, while the final sentence uses other loaded words to create a positive view. As these examples demonstrate, the words you choose can change everything about a sentence.

But now watch how author Sherman Alexie, in an essay about Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA star (see “Looking at Style” in Chapter 6, “Rhetorical Analysis”) makes the connotations surrounding three colloquial terms all meaning “beautiful” key to a controversial claim he intends to put forward:

Cut. Shredded. Jacked. Those are violent straight-boy adjectives that mean “beautiful.” But we straight boys aren’t supposed to think of other men as beautiful. We’re supposed to think of the most physically gifted men as warrior soldiers, as dangerous demigods.

And there’s the rub: When we’re talking about professional athletes, we are mostly talking about males passionately admiring the physical attributes and abilities of other males. It might not be homosexual, but it certainly is homoerotic.

Here, words actually become the argument.