English 11
Escher 2015
Voice & Audience: Writing Styles
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Whether we're conscious of it or not, we know that we must modify what we say and how we
say it according to who our audience is. We might say, 'Look at you, you silly little cutie!' if our
audience is our 2-year-old, but we wouldn't say that to a teenager. Our content, tone and
language changes according to what we know about our audience.
In writing, audience is who you are writing for. When you’re in the process of writing a paper,
it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it
consciously or not, you always write to an audience. If you know who you are writing for, you
can make good decisions about what information to include, as well as your tone and language
in conveying it.
Voice is the distinct personality, style, or point of view of a piece of writing. It is making
something your own. Voice and audience often work together to make a great piece of writing.
To illustrate the impact of audience and voice, imagine you’re emailing to your grandmother to
tell her about your first month of college. What details and stories might you include? What
might you leave out? Now imagine that you’re writing on the same topic but your audience is
your best friend. Unless you have an extremely cool grandma with whom you share details of
your personal life, it’s likely that your two emails would look quite different in terms of content,
structure, and even tone.
Isn’t my teacher my audience? Yes, however, when you write an essay with only your
instructor in mind, you might not say as much as you should or say it as clearly as you should,
because you assume that the person grading it knows more than you do and will fill in the gaps.
Sometimes it’s not the amount of explanation that matters, but the word choice and tone you
adopt. Your word choice and tone need to match your audience’s expectations. For example,
different magazines use different language depending on who (generally) will be reading them:
a scientific journal is going to be full of scientific language, whereas a common magazine like
National Geographic will use language that most people (not just scientists) will understand.
This is all because of the importance of audience towards the success of the magazine.
Paragraph/Essay Voice and Audience
Voice and audience are clearly important when it comes to writing (and marking) a piece of
writing. The four types of paragraphs/essays are listed below. Students should remember that
whichever type of paragraph/essay they are writing, they need to review their audience and
decide their voice in order to make an impact on the marker.
Paragraph/Essay Styles
There are four types of writing styles that you’ll need to understand: narrative, descriptive,
expository, and persuasive.
Narrative: tells a short story from beginning to end. It provides insight into the writer's life
concerning an incident that made an impact on the writer. In many cases, the emotions and
lessons learned will reflect some of the reader's feelings as well. Such a paragraph/essay
follows a specific chronological order of events, which all leads up to a conclusion defining the
lesson learned.
Descriptive: takes into account the five senses: smell, taste, touch, sound and sight.. Start with
something less obvious than sight, such as smell or taste. After this the writer can describe
what something feels and sounds like. Using varied descriptive words also helps a reader better
understand the subject being described.
Expository: are non-fiction writing. Their purpose it to give information to readers in an
organized format. Writers give reasons, facts, or details to support a main idea.
Persuasive: writing of any length is designed to get the reader to agree with the main idea. A
properly written paragraph/essay begins with the topic sentence, which would be the main
idea. It is important to use evidence that is compelling in support of the main idea, as well as
explaining why the evidence is relevant. Wrapping the paragraph up with a strong conclusion
leaves the reader with something to consider.