In writing, your voice is the cumulation of your writing style — your word choice, sentence structure, and flow — summed up into one word.
Sometimes, writers are too academic and too flamboyant, writing sentences that are exhaustively arduous in structure and didactic in tone that confuse and bore your audience. Other times, they’re too simple. It’s incredibly important to find the right balance of tone, flow, and structure to frame your ideas in the perfect way.
To do this, you have to consider three main aspects of your writing: Your ideas, sentence variety, and tone.
Importance of Ideas:
When you write, you have to match your voice with your ideas. To test this, physically use your voice when you write. After a paragraph, read it aloud. See if your voice matches your ideas.
For more clarification, look to great writers. Take Sean Kernan for example: His voice transcends the page; it’s almost like you can hear him talking. He accomplishes this by having an animated voice, using his word choice to match his subject matter. For example, he often talks about life experiences in short, succinct posts. In those posts, you’ll quickly find a pattern of hinted sarcasm and self-depreciation (in good taste, of course). He’s found a style that is casual yet insightful, balancing the content of his story with his voice.
Consider this: You’re reading a post about how someone felt heartbroken about something that happened, yet their language is very bubbly and humorous. Their sentence variety, flow, and tone all yell happiness, yet they are describing a depressing matter. It’s almost like a faux pas, contradicting what you say with how you say it. In normal conversation, your audience might be conflicted on how to respond, yet they still have your physical cues to suggest an emotion.
However, there is a lot more inference involved in reading. The audience must imagine your voice like a person speaking to them, while understanding the body of your content. They can’t invest into what you have to say unless your voice is resonant. Therefore, any juxtaposition in the voice and the ideas will immediately confuse the reader, which might make them click off the article.
“No matter what you think, I think it’s best to say it with the right words.”
— William Shakespeare
This quote effectively highlights the importance of voice, because master writers know that using bland language and boring structure is a recipe for a boring piece, no matter how unique the content is. When using your voice, you must consider your ideas to make sure they match. if they don’t, it will lose the reader’s engagement in the article because they don’t understand your point. In the end, content might be your message, but voice is what gets your message across.
Engaging Sentence Structure
Sentence structure is essential in keeping reader engagement throughout the piece. It’s an advanced strategy that requires much practice to master, because many new writers struggle with variety. Even in my own writing, I catch myself falling in the same pattern of sentences over and over again. To master sentence composition, you must first understand sentence structure.
The structure of a sentence is the composition of words within it. The various phrases and clauses that combine into a sentence is what keeps the readers engaged. Engaging works display a plethora of different compositions, keeping the readers on their feet when reading.
In my case, I have a habit of starting with a phrase, linking that to a independent clause, followed by a subordinate clause. That’s a complex sentence, one that I’ve found myself defaulting to every time I write. For you, it could be a compound sentence, a complex sentence, or even a compound-complex sentence. In school, you are taught to write in more complex, insightful sentences. Over time, your mind is conditioned to think that that’s the “right” way to write, and that simple sentences are for simpletons.
To use sentence structure masterfully is to highlight key ideas with them. Maybe you build a paragraph full of long, complex sentences — only to hit the readers with a three-worded simple sentence that is the payoff of the article as a whole. Drawing attention to the core takeaway of your paragraph is essential to creating an engaging piece as a whole. It’s like a movie: You have to keep the audience engaged with new developments throughout; they won’t be focused if you are too bland.
So the next time you write, try rereading your work. See if it is varied. Make sure you don’t get bored of reading it, because if you’re bored, your readers probably are as well.
Creating Emotion Through Tone
Tone is the way you say something. For example, you as a teenager were probably told by your parents to “not take that tone with them.” Even when you weren’t talking back, it seems as if they just misinterpreted your feelings.
In writing, you’re held back by having to convey your message purely with words. There is no body language to tell your subconscious attitude, no facial expressions to nail in that emotion. Many jokes, sarcastic comments, or even witty one-liners are lost in writing because people don’t know how to react.
You know the face people make when you don’t say a joke right and they’re confused? That happens more often you think especially in writing. Even the most popular comedic writers have times when they can only appeal to some of their audience, because the joke needs context. To take your writing to the next level, you must be able to make people seem like your writing is physically talking to them.
The first takeaway is to not hold back on language. Of course, there are boundaries to this in terms of demographics, but my point is to write in relation to the topic. For comedy, write in colloquialisms like you’re talking to a friend. For personal advice, be sympathetic and soft in your delivery, don’t try to be as funny. For news, be professional and elegant, nobody wants a blog when they can find the information somewhere else.
If you can master the tone of your writing, you can connect with people a lot better. They will understand your message in a deeper level, knowing the context and the emotion in which you’re saying it. Again, reading your writing aloud or asking for suggestions/reactions from other people can help with this, because you can gauge their reactions to your attempts at tone.
Taking This and Applying It
The biggest thing that will help you apply all of these tips is to read your writing again. Maybe read it once to check for grammatical errors and sentence structure, and another time for the tone and the mood of the piece. Often times, writers think it’s a waste of time to proofread, because they can’t possibly have a different opinion of their writing now than they did while writing.
Remember the times when joke sounded a lot better in your head. Did you wish you could take it back or revise its delivery? Well, writing gives that power to you. Don’t shoot yourself in the leg by skipping this step; it might really make all the difference in the engagement of your viewers.
