The words you choose and the way you put sentences and paragraphs together combine to make an overall shape, and that shape is the voice your readers perceive for you.
The way you write can make a big difference to how easy it is to get your message across, and readers will also be extracting clues to decide whether to like and trust you.
So, what sort of writing style do you want to have? Here are some common baseline styles to think about.
Academic style
When you’re working in academic circles (or perhaps specialist teams in other settings), one of the key payoffs of your writing can be to show people how clever you are. It’s a natural social status thing, but it can lead to some peculiar writing. There’s a perceived reward for using big words, complicated sentences and jargon.
Now jargon can be a very useful thing, for speeding up communication between people in a particular field. But you need to be able to adapt to a different style of writing when communicating to a more general audience. [Read more…] about What’s your writing style?