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“You don’t need a thesaurus. Just write from here — your full-sized aortic pump.”
Voice is central to a piece of writing. It influences the feel and flow of a piece. It affects the reader’s understanding of the overall message.
It makes the writing human.
We have all read a text before that makes our eyes glaze over or causes our mind to lose track of what the writer is saying. I find that one of the main reasons for this kind of reading experience is the absence of the writer’s voice. When a writer’s voice is absent, the writing becomes sterile — void of the character and personality that helps a reader connect to it.
When I teach English courses, I address my students’ concerns about voice and writing at the beginning of the semester. I ask them to write for an audience that isn’t just me. I do not want them to write a paper thinking, “I need to sound smart. I need to impress my teacher.” I do want them to write engaging and meaningful content.
I’m a big fan of the television show Friends, and there is a clip from an episode that I use at the beginning of each semester to break the ice and help my students feel more at ease with writing. (Watch the full clip here.)
During this episode, two of the characters — Chandler and Monica — are beginning the adoption process and need a recommendation letter from a friend. Joey, one of their friends, tells them he would like to write the letter. He struggles to find the right words as he writes — until he discovers the thesaurus tool on the computer and sets out to revise the letter to make it sound more “sophisticated.” When Joey hands the finished letter over to Monica and Chandler, they can’t understand what it says:
Monica: What was this sentence originally?
Joey: “They’re warm, nice people with big hearts.”
Chandler: And that became: “They’re humid, prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps.”
Later Chandler tells Joey, “You don’t need a thesaurus. Just write from here — your full-sized aortic pump!”
My students always chuckle at this part. It’s great for a laugh, but they also get the point. Joey — his voice and his emotional connection to what he is writing about — is lost behind that “sophisticated” language. When the clip is over, my students and I discuss the relevance of the characters’ exchange and how it relates to my students’ writing and what they will work on throughout the semester.
When I teach writing, I want my students to develop their writing skills — to experiment with form, vary sentence length, try new punctuation, use some advanced vocabulary. But I don’t want them to become preoccupied with “sounding smart.”
Now that I’m writing frequently, I try to heed my own advice. I don’t want to disappear behind language that isn’t mine. I don’t want to sound like somebody I’m not. I want my voice to bring life to my writing.
Last week I sent my sister a draft of a post I wrote about an experience with my family. Am I capturing this accurately? Does this sound like me? I asked her. She knows my voice, and I knew she would be honest with me. The last thing I want — especially when I’m writing a piece about the people dear to me — is for the events and the composer of the story (me) to be unrecognizable.
In his article “How to Write With Style,” Kurt Vonnegut provides tips to writers (ProWritingAid recently published a post about this article). One of Vonnegut’s eight writing tips is to “Sound like yourself.” He elaborates on this tip and says,
“I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”
When I read, I don’t generally admire a writer’s use of advanced vocabulary. What I do admire — what stays with me — is a writer’s ability to show me who they are and to use their voice to communicate a clear message.
I’m still honing my voice and will continue to as long as I write. One of my goals is to not lose sight of its importance — to make my voice clear and to use that clarity to connect and communicate with my readers.
Be what you are. Let your readers see you. Many readers, consciously or not, are searching for the person behind the text. Use your voice to help them find you.
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