Although most of your college writing will be completed in standard academic English, some of it may demand that you use specialized occupational or professional varieties of English—those characteristic of medicine, say, or computer science or law or music. Similarly, you may wish to use regional, communal, or other varieties of English to connect with certain audiences or to catch the sound of someone’s spoken words. You may even need to use words from a language other than English—in quoting someone, perhaps, or in using certain technical terms. In considering your use of language, think about what languages and varieties of English will be most appropriate for reaching your audience and accomplishing your purposes (see Chapter 29).

You will also want to think carefully about style: should you be casual and breezy, somewhat informal, formal, or extremely formal? The style you choose will call for certain kinds of sentence structures, organizational patterns, and word choices. And your style will be important in creating the tone you want, one that is appropriate to your assignment, audience, topic, purpose, and genre.

Style in visual and audio elements

Remember that visual and audio elements can influence the tone of your writing as much as the words you choose. Such elements create associations in viewers’ minds: one reader may react much more positively than another to a rap or heavy metal soundtrack, for example—and a presentation with a heavy metal accompaniment will make a far different impression than the same presentation with an easy-listening soundtrack. Writers can influence the way their work is perceived by carefully analyzing their audience and choosing audio and visual elements that set a mood appropriate to the point they want to make.

For Multilingual Writers: Bringing in other languages