The tone that academic readers expect of academic texts is recognizable in choices in diction and sentence variety as well as organization and transitional cues. Lack of variety in word choice and the use of a general rather than genre-specific vocabulary mark a text as the writing of a beginner. Sentence length and syntactic variation are also features of sophisticated academic texts. Not only do we work with student writers to help them recognize and employ conventional sentence boundaries, but we may take steps explicitly designed to extend their skills in creating sentence variety, such as assigning sentence-combining exercises.

Matters of tone, or stylistic choices, are often associated with the development of "voice," conceived as a relatively stable self-portrayal of the writer as an intelligent, well-informed, ethical authorial presence with a more or less original, academically defensible position on an issue, a presence that more or less informs the entire text and further contributes to its cohesiveness and focus. Our attention to authorial voice may be  implicit rather than explicit: we tend to reward the creation of an academic voice with responses that affirm the writer's value as a thinking person through our marginal comments or in conferences with the writer.

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