Find Your Voice

I recently checked out a blog by a woman named Lorianne, a writer and college professor who commented on New Word a while back (see From Book To Screen: The Color Purple). It's called Dr. D's Teaching Blog. She set it up as part of the Expository Writing course she teaches at Keene State College.

One of her posts speaks about finding your voice as a writer. Although the focus is on blog writing, it really speaks to any kind of writing as we are the source of our own words. It really touched me because that's the journey I've been on for a while now as a would-be writer, and most recently as a blogger, and I thought it could be of help to anyone who wants to start writing or improve their writing.

Although she wrote this for her students, it would be interesting to do the exercises just for fun, especially if you have some writer/blogger friends. It's always great to learn something new. If you don't want to include others, you might want to skip the last part, or just make notes to yourself.

Lorianne's been kind enough to allow me to reprint that entry here, so read, enjoy, and find your voice.

Also, check out Lorianne's personal blog, Hoarded Ordinaries.

FINDING VOICE IN SOMEONE ELSE'S WRITING
by Lorianne DiSabato

"Voice" is the intangible personality or presence that gives power to a piece of writing. Voice is what makes your writing sound like "you" and no one else, and it is the quality or tone that either grabs a reader's attention or leaves a reader cold. Writing without voice sounds dry and detached; writing with voice sounds alive and engaging as if the words themselves have reached out and touched you.

One way to find your own voice is by writing frequently: this is one of the potential benefits of blogging. By writing (and sharing your writing) frequently, you can, over time, discover the "true voice" that lurks behind your words.

Detecting your own voice, however, can be difficult. We're sometimes too close to our writing to judge it objectively, and we sometimes can't tell whether a particular piece will speak powerfully to readers. This is why getting feedback on our writing is so helpful. Often our readers can find our voice more accurately than we ourselves can.

To help you find your blogging voice, read someone else's ENTIRE blog from the most recent posts to the very first one. (To do this, you'll have to use the archive links in the blog's sidebar.) As you're reading, right-click and open in a new window the permalink to a handful of entries (between 1 and 3) that you think demonstrate the strongest voice. In other words, as you are reading, make note of

• the blog's best entry
• the blog's most powerful entry
• the blog's most genuine or "real" entry

When you've determined (and right-clicked) the handful of entries you think are the best, most powerful, or most "real," post a comment on the blog's MOST RECENT entry. In this comment, copy and paste the permalinks to the handful of entries you selected, and tell the writer why you think these entries are particularly noteworthy. Then, I want you to tell the writer how you would describe their voice: what sort of authorial tone or "personality" do they present to their readers? (For example, do they have a humorous voice, a trustworthy voice, a sarcastic voice, a witty voice, a confessional voice, a conversational voice, etc.)