Academic and Formal Writing Style Guide

An Introduction to Academic Style

Brainstorm:

In a Quickwrite brainstorm as many answers to the following questions as possible.

Why do we write?

What do we enjoy in other people's writing?

How can we improve our own writing?

Ultimately people write to communicate for various reasons.

As readers, we want writing to be many different things: interesting, entertaining, clear, focused, concise, and purposeful.  Our goal is to consider how can continue to impove these elements in our own writing.  If we think about the rhetorical triangle, our purpose and audience might change our approach and our style.  Primarily in this AP Language and Compostion Course, we will focused on academic writing.  Academic writing has some specific style expectations.

Style is the choices that an author makes in diciton, syntax, figurative language, and other choices of use of language in order for an author to achieve his or her purpose.  An author's individual style should also be appropriate for the purpose of their writing.  Ultimately, the goal of style is to make our writing individual and personal, while also making our writing interesting, entertaining, clear, focused, concise, and purposeful. 

Your task will be to revise the rough draft all of your essays for the style expectations that follow.