Fall 2022 Post 09: Tone in Academic Writing

Sometimes Josh Bernoff writes a string of posts that all speak to me. His September 30, 2022, post entitled "Tone matters. Yours should be authoritative, but not boring" addresses an important issue for my writing classes: tone. Tone is a problem for many of my students who have mastered the casual familiarity of texting but not the authoritative tone of academic writing. Bernoff has some enlightening points to make about tone in nonfiction writing, and I explore his comments in this post, applying them specifically to academic writing.

Tone Is Always Important

First, Bernoff defines tone in terms of the reader/writer relationship, which is very important to the way I teach academic writing. He says, "Tone is the way in which an author’s prose choices communicate the author’s relationship with the reader." This relationship is tricky for many students because academic documents are written mostly for people we don't know very well, if at all, and thus, we are often unsure about the relationship we should have with them.

Compare this to texting where we usually are writing to people with whom we have a clear relationship: friend, sibling, parent, boss, lover, colleague, or whatever. We already understand the relationship, and most of us are adept at using a tone that fits that relationship. Moreover, when we use a tone that doesn't fit the relationship — like telling our friends to clean-up their rooms — then our friends are usually quick to let us know that they don't like our tone and that we'd best change it.

But much academic writing is written for people we don't know well and may never know, so our relationships with them can be obscure. Moreover, most academic writing is supposed to be written from a position of relative authority. By relative authority, I mean that the writer is supposed to know more about the topic than the reader. Readers usually read nonfiction to gain expanded or new knowledge about something that interests them, and they will quit reading if they come to suspect that the writer doesn't have any new, useful information to share. But college reverses this usual reader/writer relationship forcing students to write to a teacher who usually knows more about the topic than the student does (there are exceptions, often with humorous results — at least, humorous for the students if not the teacher). When we are forced to write for someone who knows more than we do about the given topic, then we know that we are not writing for the purpose of helping someone learn more about some topic in which we have valuable expertise or experience; rather, we are writing for the purpose of being judged by a teacher who knows more about the topic than we do. No one likes being judged, so most students don't like writing for their teachers. That's one reason why I always give my students a different audience: so that they can write from a position of relative authority. You don't have to know everything about a given topic — your academic major, for instance — but you do have to know more than your audience.

So what is an appropriate tone with an academic audience? Bernoff says that we must be authoritative but not boring. The correct tone in an academic essay says, "These are the things that I know. I discovered them through research, experience, and expertise [which I document for you]. I am sharing them because I want you to benefit." This authoritative tone implies that the writer is worth reading because the writer is knowledgeable and wants to enrich the reader's life with some useful information.

Note that the first and most important job of the authoritative tone is to convince the reader that you, the writer, know what you are writing about. Losing the confidence of your reader is a disaster for an academic writer: academic readers will stop reading you and teachers will give you poor grades. So the first principle of solid academic writing is to learn something relevant and useful to your reader and to back it up with documentation. Basically, you say something like: I believe X and so does Albert Einstein, as he says here: "blah blah blah" (204).

The second job of the authoritative tone is to focus on the content, not the writer. If you use personal experience to make your point, keep the focus on the point and not on yourself. Remember: your reader is trying to learn about which major they should choose and how. They are not so interested in learning about your anguish and angst in choosing your major, so don't dwell on it. Mention your personal experiences if necessary, and then move on to how your experience is useful to the reader.

And how should you not be boring? Bernoff has some fine suggestions based on his years of writing nonfiction, so look them over.

I'll close by again comparing and contrasting the texting that you do daily with the academic writing that I'm asking you to do. Texting means that you are already a writer; however, you are not likely texting to academic readers and academic issues; thus, your tone in texting is not appropriate for your academic essays. This means that most of you will have to write and then rewrite several times your essays to find the correct tone that captures an authoritative yet engaging relationship with your academic readers, including your teachers.

Leave a comment about your own approach to tone in your academic essays and how it contrasts with your texting tone.