DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION SITUATIONS AND DIFFERENT AUDIENCES HAVE DIFFERENT DESIRES AND EXPECTATIONS.
Now, take a second and think about the differences here.  If you wrote to your boss in the informal way you wrote to your friend, the boss would probably think something was weird, but in the same way, if you wrote to your friend in the formal way that you wrote to your boss, the friend would also think something was weird.  So, this illustrates that not only the content of the message but also the way that you write it (the word choices, sentence structures, and even punctuation) has an important and powerful impact on the success of your message being received by your intended audience.  What’s going on here?  Why is it that you can’t just use the same way of communicating with every audience?  It’s because different communication situations and different audiences have different desires and expectations about how they like to be communicated with in a given situation.  If you don’t meet these expectations, your message won’t be communicated the best way it possibly could.

This also happens when we speak, although you may have never stopped to think about it.  When you go in to give a report to your boss, a lot of things might change in how you are speaking compared to hanging out with your friend later after work.  There will be a difference between your word choice, the types of sentences you use, how authoritative a tone you take, your use of honorifics (words and sentence structures expressing status, politeness, and/or respect), and even the amount of accent present in your pronunciation.  When we are in a high status stressful speech situation, like giving a report to our boss, we tend to have less regional accent present in our pronunciations, word choice, and sentence structures while we may make greater use of honorifics to signify that we respect the difference in social position between our self (an entry level number cruncher) and our boss.

Now, you shouldn’t take this example of a high status speech situation as the default way to speak.  For example, when we meet up with our friend later for dinner and start recounting the daily drama between Roger and Sue in the breakroom, we aren’t still going to be talking like we were with our boss.  No, now our vowels are sounding like we grew up in Hemingway, SC, we’re using a more relaxed vocabulary and sentence structure, and since we are talking to our best friend our use of honorifics has changed to signal that we are of equal status in the relationship.

These changes, which we looked at in the Shifting Styles Badge in English 101, are fundamental and deep, but they take place naturally, multiple times on a daily basis and are often below the level of conscious awareness.  Linguists call this kind of change between multiple ways of speaking code switching.  Listen to yourself when you are away from home and you get a call from someone back in your hometown in New Jersey.  You are probably going to be talking on the phone a lot more like people do back in Jersey than what you are talking like when you speak to your college roommate who’s from Hemingway, SC.

NONE OF THESE WAYS OF COMMUNICATING IS BETTER; THEY ARE JUST DIFFERENT. 
You see, one speaker has a variety of different ways of communicating available to them.  None of these ways of communicating is better; they are just different.  What determines which is the best way of communicating has nothing to do with “rules” taught to you from some self-proclaimed, all-knowing automaton (like Mrs. Crabtree, your fourth grade grammar Nazi English Teacher).  Rather, what matters most is who you are talking to and, given the speech and social situation, what that audience’s expectations are.  Going back to our previous examples of written communication, it would be perceived as wrong to use formal language with your friend since she would be expecting you to be more informal given your relationship and the content of the email.  It would be equally wrong for you to use informal language with your boss in the email since given your relationship and the content of the email she would be expecting a certain amount of formality.  Thus, the audience is what determines the language that we use and how we go about communicating.

WHAT DOES SHIFTING STYLES LOOK LIKE?
Now, what about times when the style of language shifts from what the audience expects in a given situation? Read the following example from Geneva Smitherman, a retired distinguished professor at Michigan State University who specializes in sociolinguistics and African American English.  She is writing in a peer-reviewed, academic journal, The English Journal, to an audience of English professors and compositionists about the achievement gap between Caucasian students and students of color.

 

After you write the paragraph, answer the following questions in complete sentences:

Did you consciously change your writing style? If so, how? If not, why?
Was writing this message easy or difficult for you? Explain.
When writing the message, what concerned you?
Are you comfortable with this style of writing?
SCENARIO B
PART 1: WRITING
Write your parents or guardians an email message explaining the same problem with early morning classes. 

PART 2: REFLECTING
After writing the paragraph, answer the same questions in complete sentences.

Did you consciously change your writing style? If so, how? If not, why?
Was writing this message easy or difficult for you? Explain.
When writing the message, what concerned you?
Are you comfortable with this style of writing?
SCENARIO C
PART 1: WRITING
Write a paragraph to CCU administrators explaining the single largest problem with early morning classes.

PART 2: REFLECTING
After you write the paragraph, answer the same questions in complete sentences.

Did you consciously change your writing style? If so, how? If not, why?
Was writing this message easy or difficult for you? Explain.
When writing the message, what concerned you?
Are you comfortable with this style of writing?