One the most surprising and significant takeaways from this week’s materials was what Dr. Kim said in her lecture “there is no single correct writing style”. Of course, that makes sense because writing styles are going to be different depending on things like the audience and the context. In the discussion of linguistic dialects, there was an example of how a teenaged relative may communicate differently on the phone than they do while texting is a social dialect called style shifting. Code-switching is a similar phrase that people of color use when talking about how they sometimes adapt their language and speech patterns when speaking to people from outside of their own culture to assimilate in the moment.

These examples of dialects seem more straightforward to me than the way I try to find my style for things like the assigned recommendation report. There’s a feeling that I should use a style with words and phrases that are more complex because that is more “professional”. I use the quotation marks because there’s no single correct professional style either. When considering the style for my assignment, I considered that this is a report that is going to a busy professional and I wanted to use as much plain language and brevity as possible to get my point across. I’m not always sure though that that is what people think of when they consider what a professional style is.

Regarding my own career goals, I’d like to be able to fine tune what “professional” means in each context that I need to use it. In my current position, I don’t struggle with this distinction as often; I am surrounded by PhDs, but no one is expecting a thesis from me when I’m trying to explain how to do expense reports in Concur. As a matter of fact, sometimes brilliant engineers need a lot more clarity when it comes to learning things that are far easier than investigating the principles of tribology or nanotechnology. In the context of a career in the corporate world, it’s a lot less clear to me how much technical language is too technical, and how much plain language is too plain. In that respect, it’s great to know that one size does not fit all, even if finding the right style for each situation means more work on my end.