When you get dressed to go to class, what’s your go-to attire? Do you automatically grab sweats and a t-shirt? Do you have an internship later in the day, requiring that you aim for business casual? Whatever your go-to style, it probably feels comfortable as part of your daily life—almost a part of your identity. We tend to think of personal style as, well, personal. It’s YOUR style, after all. You get to choose it. Of course, it’s also true that your stylistic choices are almost always influenced by others. Your style has likely changed over time, due in part to fashion trends, what others decree are in style. Sometimes your stylistic choices are determined by the situation. For example, when you dress to attend a fancy wedding, you’d likely make clothing choices that you wouldn’t make if you were going to class, or to the grocery store. In all of these clothing situations, your sense of style is formed not only by situation but by a variety of factors including your own preferences and what others find fashionable and/or appropriate to the situation. These same stylistic considerations for your clothing choices apply to your writing choices. Many of your writing choices contribute to your writing style. The tone you adopt is a stylistic choice. Likewise, your choice of vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax all contribute to style. These are your choices to make as a writer—but your choices are often influenced by how you expect your readers to perceive them. You probably wouldn’t include emojis on your resume because you could reasonably expect potential employers to be unimpressed by that stylistic choice. On the other hand, if you are writing a lab report for your chemistry professor, you would choose to avoid first-person pronouns, because you know your prof will expect the appearance of scientific objectivity in your language (style) choices. Notice how in each of these examples, audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation influence style. Writing style is sometimes defined as the way you write, the th