Your Voice
A writer’s voice includes their style of writing, their perspective and their tone in writing. Voice is your personality expressed in writing, while tone reflects your attitude in a piece of writing. It’s what makes your writing ‘sound’ authentic to your reader. Your voice affects how you tell the story or cover the subject matter of your literary work, and how you make a reader feel about it. Consequently, it impacts the way they experience your story or the impression they form about the topic of your written piece.
Your Style
Your style is how you choose to tell a story. It’s about the mechanics of your writing ‒ the individual word choices, the structure of sentences, use of punctuation, choice of formatting, and whether your writing is formal or informal, concise or detailed, objective (factual) or subjective (opinionated) ‒ to mention but a few.
Your Perspective
Every writer has a perspective. Perspective is not to be confused with the story’s point of view or method of narration (i.e. first person, third person). While point of view focuses on ‘who’ is telling the story ‒ who is speaking (the narrator), perspective is how you choose to view and relay what’s happening in the story ‒ how the narrator perceives the events or circumstances.
Perspective is unique to you. Each character in your story can be involved in the same event, but each will come away with a unique set of experiences or observations. Perspective is an essential component of your voice because it determines what you bring forward in the story.
Your Tone
Your tone is your attitude or feeling about the story you’re writing or the subject matter you are covering as well as your attitude or feeling towards the reader. The tone relates to the mood in a piece of writing and it may remain constant or fluctuate throughout the work. It may vary in degree of intensity or shift entirely at some point.
Your tone can be serious, dark, funny, sardonic, ironic, wistful, formal, cheerful, melancholy ‒ the whole range of human emotions. Tone serves to convey a story the way that you want it to be experienced; it gives the reader cues on how to feel about the subject matter or what’s happening in the story.
Your word choice, sentence structure, imagery, writing mechanics (such as punctuation and word styling), and how you feel about what’s happening meld to create a tone throughout your work.
Final Thoughts
Over time, your natural style will develop, as will your writer’s voice. As you read the literary works of other writers, you’ll be influenced by their styles as well. But, of course, for your style and voice to develop and fully emerge, you have to write and write and keep on writing.
Contact me should you require a review of your writing. Avoid embarrassing and costly errors and communicate more effectively with Proof Perfect NZ. Email renellj@proofperfect.co.nz or call 029 1230 158.
