The Author's Voice

Some of the papers you write during your college career may call for you to be extremely formal.  Assignments for formal papers often

• Call for sophisticated diction,

• Ban the use of contractions (such as can't for cannot),

• Ban the use of abbreviations,

• Ban the use of most personal pronouns (i.e.: you may be required to refer to yourself as the author instead of I or me, and you may be prohibited from using you), and

• Ban sentences that begin with conjunctions (such as and and but).

However, other assignments may allow you to be informal.  In responding to those assignments, you may sound stilted and pretentious if you refer to yourself as the author and adapt other formal conventions. 

Your instructor may tell you how formal or informal a particular paper should be.  Chapter 8 ("Making Language Choices," pages 52-57) of The Longman Concise Companion can help you decide what style is appropriate for a particular assignment.