Understanding Voice and Style

Style is the particular personality that a writer brings to his or her work. This is often referred to as the writer's voice, and just like how everybody's voice sounds a little bit different, so too does every writer's voice look a little bit different from everybody else's. Think of a writer's voice the same way you would a singers voice: two singers can take the same lyrics and instruments and make two completely different sounding songs. A writer's voice is the result of the choices he or she makes about issues like word choice, punctuation, and sentence construction (more on that later). Tone, which is a similar concept, often gets lumped in with voice and style, but it's actually its own separate category that describes the mood of the work. If we compare writing to singing again, voice would be the personal style the singer brings to a song, and tone would be the mood of the music itself.

Every time you sit down to type, whether it's an academic paper or an email, you're making choices about what kind of words you use and how you use them. You might include a funny joke in an email to your friend or use technical jargon in a lab report for chemistry class. When you're making those decisions, you're actually creating a voice for yourself without even realizing it. Every little choice you make when you write adds up to a distinctive style, but there are a few key categories that help define a writer's voice.

One of the biggest distinctions between writing styles is word choice. The English language is full of words that have closely related meanings and there are often dozens of ways you could choose to communicate your ideas, which means that the words your choose are usually a reflection of your own style. For instance, in a persuasive piece aimed at teenagers you might choose to use slang or abbreviations, while for academic writing you might rely on more technical vocabulary. But even within the same genre, writers can create widely differing types of works just playing with word choice - think of the southern, simple dialect used by the characters in a William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying versus the eloquent and introspective narrator of The Great Gatsby. Of course, there are lots of other stylistic differences between those novels, but the languages used by the characters is one of the most important.

A sentence needs to have a subject and a verb, but other than those two rules, a writer has a whole lot of leeway in how they choose to put sentences together. You can stick with a straightforward "subject-verb-object" style, or you can add flourishes like prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses. A lot of these choices will depend on who's reading your work. For example, material aimed at younger readers should have simpler sentences that texts produced for older or more sophisticated audiences, and scientific writing tends to favor simpler constructions as well. On the other hand, writing long, intricate sentences is a hallmark of many famous fiction writers, and choosing to use more complex syntax is a way to create a distinctive voice.

Much like sentence structure, as a writer you have a lot of leeway when it comes to deciding what type of punctuation you want to use. Now, it might not seem as dramatic or obvious as some of the other issues listed above, but it can make a difference when it comes to how your work is perceived by the reader. For example, punctuation such as dashes and exclamation marks are generally seen as more casual, so when you use them it will make your work more conversational than academic. Another example of how strongly punctuation can inform voice can be seen in the work of writer Cormac McCarthy, who creates a distinctive style by not using quotation marks in dialogue.

The use of literary devices such as metaphors, alliteration, and foreshadowing will also help build an author's signature voice. There are dozens of these literary tricks out there (way too many to get into here), and every writer is going to use them in his or her own way. But, no matter what kind of text you're working with, literary devices almost always part of the writing and reading experience.

Every time you start working on a writing project, you should have some idea what kind of voice you want to project. Keep in mind that, as a writer, your voice doesn't need to be identical in everything you write. While it's likely that many of your particular stylistic quirks will pop up no matter what you're working on, it's still possible, and often necessary, to tailor your voice to meet the needs of specific project.