Finding a Voice and a Style

I once took a graduate course, from a well-published and finely educated writer, on the topic of voice. In the first moments of the class, several of us audaciously asked the instructor to define the term. A few minutes into her answer, I sensed confusion in the classroom. After 10 more minutes of wandering discussion, it became clear that our teacher couldn't handle this most basic query. She knew it when she read it, she said to our amazement, but who could hope to define voice or its literary twin, style? Today, after years of teaching voice myself—and of continuing my own writing—I finally understand my instructor's confusion. While all writers crave an individual style, and while we yearn for a distinctive voice for ourselves or the subjects we profile, those goals remain among our greatest challenges, and even experienced practitioners can retreat into debates over their mystery. Many science writers also must contend with journalistic precepts that subjugate or even eliminate individual style. In this chapter I review the complications and examine the tools of voice and style, concluding with exercises that should help writers identify and hone their own. When writers for the New York Times or the Modern Language Association or the New England Journal of Medicine talk of style, they often mean the strict rules of spelling, punctuation, abbreviation, and other usage as set forth in hallowed style manuals. Style is also used, more colloquially, to describe writing according to purpose or profession: academic, scientific, journalistic, digital, bureaucratic, literary, postmodern, and so forth. For academics, style has classical roots in Aristotle, Cicero, and that granddaddy of Rhetoric, Hermogenes, who rated style as grand, middle, or plain. Writer Ben Yagoda, in his The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (2004), defines style as how a writer “uses language to forge or reflect an attitude toward the world.” For the purpose of this chapter, let's define voice as a writer's personality on the page. Style is the personality imposed on our writing by outside rules and/or our own techniques and mindset. Voice is an individual writing personality, whether distinctively our own, one we recount or create, or, sometimes inescapably, both.