STYLE

• Audience - Who am I writing for?
• What is their background (age, gender class)?
• What is their attitude to my subject (belief, concerns, opinions)?
• What do they already know about my subject?
• What do they expect from me (what they hope to learn, what level of expertise I possess, what tone I will adopt, what method I will use to achieve my aims with them)?
• What is my relationship to my audience (their knowledge of me, the extent to which we share assumptions and a sense of purpose)?
• What do I want my audience to do with what I write (act, think differently, use the information)?
• Voice - How do I approach my audience?
• What information about my background could affect what I am writing (my age, gender, class)?
• What is my attitude to the subject (my beliefs concerns, opinions)?
• What do I know about my subject (my particular information, my level of expertise)?
• What do I expect from my audience? That is to ask, What do I want my audience to do with what I write (act, think differently, use the information)?
• What is my relationship to my audience(their knowledge of me, the extent to which we share assumptions and a sense of purpose)?
• Tone - What is the relationship between ourselves and our readers?
• Is my tone fair and reasonable?
• Is my tone authoritative, without being condescending, pretentious, adversarial or artificial?
• Is my tone relatively formal without being stuffy?
• Is my tone consistent?
• Style - What level of formality should I adopt?
• Informal vs. Formal
• Informal
• use contractions
• refer to yourself with the in the first person "I" and to you audience with the second person "you"
• use active rather than passive voice
• keep your sentences short and simple
• pick common, everyday words
• Formal
• do not use contractions
• refer to oneself in the third person and avoid direct address to one's audience
• preferring passive constructions
• constructing lengthy, complicated sentences
• valorizing pedantic (for example, pedantic) or Latinate terminology
• General Guidelines
• be concise and clear
• create clear images by using concrete nouns and active verbs
• employ simple, familiar sentences
• vary sentence length and pattern
• use parallelism and other devices for emphasis (repetition, placement, key terms, concrete details
• use effective transitional terms to guide your readers though your sentences

Notes:

• Number and Person
 

Number/Person	Singular	Plural
First Person	I, me, my, mine	we, us, our, ours
Second Person	you, your	you, your, yours
Third Person	he, she, it, him, her, his her,one	they, them, their, theirs

 
• Voice
• Active Voice - The actor is the subject of the sentence.
• John broke the window
• Passive Voice - The item acted on in the "subject position" of the sentence. The actor, if mentioned at all, in a secondary position. This form is used the shift the focus from the actor to the objected acted on. This form is frequently used in constructions. The result is that the focus is less on the writer than the item written about. This can be good or bad depending on the nature of the writing.
• The window was broken by John (or even: The window was broken.)