Audience, Style and Sentence Choices

Writers use similes, metaphors, analogies and anecdotes to connect a new idea to something the audience already knows. A comparison only helps if the audience has the background to understand it.

The words and sentence structures a writer chooses shape how readers see them: informed, fair, careless or biased. Slanted or loaded word choice can reveal a writer's bias and cost them credibility with some readers.

No two audiences are the same, and what one audience knows, believes and needs can change over time. So writers pick their evidence, organization and language for the specific readers in front of them: the same argument might look very different for experts and for the general public.

Style is what you get when you put all of a writer's choices together: the words, the sentence patterns and how they handle punctuation and other conventions. When you analyze style, you explain how those choices work together to serve the writer's purpose.

Writers sometimes show a complicated or ironic view through their style. Irony happens when what a text says clashes with what readers expect or believe, as when a satirist pretends to support an outrageous idea in order to criticize something real.

Modifiers, which can be words, phrases or clauses, add detail about something in the sentence and should sit right next to what they describe to avoid confusion. Parenthetical elements, set off by commas, dashes or parentheses, interrupt a sentence to add helpful but non-essential information.