Your college instructors, as well as your future colleagues and supervisors, will expect you to demonstrate your ability to think critically, consider ethical issues, find as well as solve problems, do effective research, work productively with people of widely different backgrounds, and present the knowledge you construct in a variety of ways and in a variety of genres and media. Your success will depend on communicating clearly and on making appropriate choices for the context.

If you’re like most students, you probably have less familiarity with academic writing contexts than you do with informal contexts. You may not have written formal academic papers much more than five pages long before starting college, and you may have done only minimal research. The contexts for your college writing will require you to face new challenges and even new definitions of writing; you may be asked, for example, to create a persuasive website or to research, write, and deliver a multimedia presentation. If you grew up speaking and writing in other languages, the transition to producing effective college work can be especially complicated. Not only do you have to learn new information and new ways of thinking and arguing in unfamiliar rhetorical situations, but you also have to do it in a language that may not come naturally to you.

Instructors sometimes assume that students are already familiar with their expectations for college writing. To complicate the matter further, there is no single “correct” style of communication in any country, including the United States. Effective oral styles differ from effective written styles, and what is considered good writing in one field of study is not necessarily appropriate in another. Within a field, different rhetorical situations and genres may require different ways of writing. In business, for example, memos are usually short and simple, while a market analysis report may require complex paragraphs with tables, graphs, and diagrams. Even the variety of English often referred to as “standard” covers a wide range of styles.

Talking the Talk: Conventions