Ask three different people what writing is and you’ll get three different answers. One person might tell you that it is the physical act of assigning visual forms to words and thoughts, of representing on paper (even digitally) our ideas. Another might say that writing is simply a form of communication, while the third might argue that writing is a way of making meaning.

It can be easy to default to thinking about writing mainly as the first two of these definitions, a tool for transferring ideas to paper, but it is in that meaning-making definition that the real meat of writing resides. Another way to think about this is to think of the social nature of writing: writing always has an audience, an reader that the author is somehow interacting with or trying to persuade. The stakes of that persuasion may be different–a text message to your friends inviting them to dinner at the caf feels very different than a grocery list written for yourself or an academic paper written for a class– but the interaction between author and audience is never absent.

Because of that, it can be helpful to think about writing as a conversation. You pitch yourself different depending on who you’re speaking to, right? Asking your best friend if you can borrow something of theirs should sound very different than asking a professor for a letter of recommendation! You would use different forms of address, you might build up to your ask in different ways, you’d probably pick different environments or times of day at which to ask, and even the intonations of your voice might even be different. While we can’t completely recreate those verbal cues of intonation in writing, we can influence how the reader “hears” us through our use of specific vocabulary, syntax (i.e. choices of grammar or sentence structure), and even formatting. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘tone‘ in writing.

For instance, in the paragraph above, I signaled a more personal tone by using the pronoun “you” and addressing you, my reader, directly. I signaled a slightly more informal tone by using some varying punctuation, both in the form of the rhetorical question and in the exclamation point. I used a contraction (“can’t” instead “cannot”) for the same reason. You can imagine how differently this post would read if I were prioritizing an impersonal and extremely formal tone (boring– that’s how it would read!) Those are all rhetorical decisions I made, decisions that I hope will effect how persuasive my argument is to you, and they are all decisions that I made with my audience in mind.

As you write this week, consider these questions:

  1. Who are you writing for? Your professor? Your peers? A fictional audience? 
  2. What information does that person need, and what do they already have? 
  3. What changes can you make to your tone to be as persuasive as possible?
  4. Would you be writing differently if you were only writing for yourself?

Happy writing!