When I was small, I thought “putting my face on” was my aunt’s term for applying makeup. What I didn’t understand was the role that morning ritual played in helping my aunt prepare her private self for public consumption; putting her face on meant she was moving through familiar steps to create a space between her unfiltered home reality and her carefully-tailored presentation for others.
In writing, we put our face on through considering our audience (who might be seeing us), the tone of our language (how they see us, at first glance–how we carry ourselves), and the codes we’re engaging (what the expectations are in the space we’re using to engage, and whether those match for us and our audience).
Adjusting to your audience’s expectations is generally a wise maneuver: whatever your purpose in writing, you’re asking your audience to volunteer some of their most precious time and energy resources in consuming what you’ve produced. If you can meet them halfway by removing obstacles to engagement, you’re much likely to succeed in your writing. And. You have to make sure you’re not meeting them so far that you’re losing your own identity and goal.
A standard place to start is tone-shifting. Consider, for instance, how your Slack messages with coworkers sound different from emails to your supervisor. A quick scan might show differences in sentence or paragraph length–or whether there are any of either, but the most obvious difference is likely in the tone you’re conveying through word choice and punctuation. Example: every how to understand corporate buzzwords image.
At the next level, you can consider a fuller code-switching. This isn’t just a shift in tone or phrasing, but a fuller shift in how you act and think. Code-switching is often a case of safety and mutual comfort, since it can help you present yourself as though you are already part of the group you’re addressing. We all code-switch: I don’t show up to lead book club as quite the same version of myself that shows up as a paid speaker, but it most often affects those members of our teams who originate in a different cultural space. Code-switching is a self-protective blending-in that can have real and severe consequences on the switcher.
The trick here–the skill to learn–is to balance appropriate and beneficial audience-adjustment with our sincerity and purpose for showing up in the first place. How to put your face on without losing your face in the process.
Something Polished 
I had not encountered the concept of code-switching before. Thanks. Seems like another facet of some deeper phenomena that includes the tension of “fake it till you make it”, “be true to yourself”, “the angels of our better nature”, and “when in Rome”.
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I think you’re right, though it’s a facet that especially highlights some of the codes within power structures (e.g. how we behave in the workplace and who’s there to enforce it). Since I know you’re a reader, there’s a banned YA book I read for my book club that walks through what it’s like in a school setting–“The Hate U Give”. And here’s a longer HBR article if you want to start a rabbit hole: https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-codeswitching.
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I added the book to my audible queue. Thanks. The HBR article . It occurs to me there is code switching that happens everywhere. If I am around my musician buddies it is different than my executive cycling buddies than engineers vs. being around an all female group of educator friends. These different One thing I am very interested in that we don’t seem able able to talk about is the idea that each of these cultures/groups/boxes that trssellate my identity have different priorities and perspectives that make them better at different things. So when I shift around the all female educator group my more primary engineer identity gets stretched to focus on empathy, feelings, caretaking and developing others. But probably at a hit to my detached problem solving skills that come to the fore around the engineers or the bias towards action and risk taking that has more utility around my executive cycling buddies. This conversation can easily stray into social Darwinism but I also feel that not acknowledging the different priorities and strengths of different parts of ones mosaic of cultural identity is self defeating, especially when we won’t call out the parts of any subculture we belong to as being toxic. These call outs can usually only be done from the inside. The chapter on the educators trying to improve the plight of Latinos and realizing the toxicity of their “pobrecito” thinking in their high empathy culture from Keegan’s immunity to change comes to mind, as do the admissions of a number of older Lesbians I talked to who were begining to identify systemic issues in their community that are related to why all seven of the couples I assisted with DNA are no longer together. The upside seems to be that as my peers in many of these groups age, their willingness to be self critical of the group seems to go up. When I used to talk to musicians about the fact that so few of us hold our own weight and paid our own rent, I would get a lot of defensive blowback on the nature of art. But now they are more willing to admit that they’re is often a laziness that goes along with a mental landscape that includes musician as a primary chunk of identity.
isaac davenport phd ee (303) 859-5773 isaac@isaacdavenport.com
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