What is Your Voice?

Detecting Your Accent

Despite opinions to the contrary, what constitutes a writer’s “voice” relies on their writing style, technique, vocabulary, and grammatical structure. Detecting a writer’s voice is something that most people do after reading a specific author for a long time. It’s like your relationship with someone that you've become intimately familiar with. Family members, friends, and coworkers are all people we become so familiar with their speech patterns that we instantly know if someone is trying to impersonate them. Or if there is something wrong with them, by the way, they are talking alone.

In writing this becomes clear once you’ve had access to enough of an author’s writing. This is part of what often turns people off from books written by a ghostwriter, but carry a prominent author’s name. It’s also how people can detect when a well-known author is writing under a pseudonym.

Your voice becomes like a fingerprint

This part is pretty straightforward. Your voice in writing becomes like a fingerprint. It is very hard for most people to get away from. There are exceptions to this. For instance, when switching from one genre to another, some authors can code-switch their voices. But this is different from changing your voice entirely. This switching is necessary though. It’s the same thing we do when talking to friends versus coworkers. It’s also the same thing you do when talking to a supervisor vs. a coworker. Or a child versus an adult. This is what good authors do when switching from fiction to nonfiction. Or from horror to fantasy. It’s a matter of finding the right tone, wording, and cadence to communicate to your audience. Yet, most authors will still have the same voice no matter what when writing in the same genre.

Detecting Plagiarism and Copycat Writing

Detecting an author’s voice is one of the easiest ways to tell when someone is plagiarizing a work. Even if they have not outright plagiarized a work, one can tell when a writer has ripped it off from another author. Smart “writers” on the internet will know to not plagiarize a work completely. Rather they will take the central idea of a work, change the wording, add their own “flair”, or try to bury the ripped-off part as far into the work as they can. This is often achieved by browsing through a thesaurus. Or rather in today's world, googling the synonym of a word. What this often does is create sentences that, while correct, are often awkward or hard to read, unless the person doing it knows how to change the verbage to match the tone. This is rarely the case. Most of the time it turns the writing into something that the average reader won’t continue reading. For those who write and often have to switch verbiage around, this sometimes leads to a comedy of errors when someone tries to do this. And is also part of what makes AI writing detectable to the wary eye. This is because the writing that is training AI algorithms mainly comes from the internet.

An example of this would be a sentence like:

He overcame the other driver as he traveled around the racetrack.

What a plagiarist or AI might come up with could be something like:

He circumvented the other driver as he circumnavigated the racetrack.

Both of these are technically correct, but one is more colloquial and easier to understand for the average reader.

Developing your voice

One of the hardest things to do is to develop your voice in writing. It’s not simply putting words on paper. It’s developing a vocabulary that’s verbose enough to know when you need to cut three words down to one or two that still convey the same message. Another important aspect of developing your voice is understanding cadence. This is especially true when writing things like poetry. Oftentimes people think that poetry must rhyme or have a certain structure taught in school. But this is not true. Knowing how and when to make your reader start and stop certain words affects how your writing is read.

This is also important when writing dialogue. All too often in fiction writers are great at world-building, or giving you character development. But many fall apart when they get to dialogue, which often results in stilted dialogue. Also, it is my personal belief that this is a point where many editing tools hurt authors. People do not speak in academic or completely correct sentences. Thus, things that naturally occur in a conversation get corrected to fit what the computer is telling the writer to fix.

Strengthening your voice

Strengthening your voice in writing is like strengthening anything else, whether it’s vocal training or going to the gym. The more you write, the better you get at it. But also, it’s learning how to write on any topic. I learned this in college, where I often switched from writing a paper for a business class to writing a history paper on the same day.

You don’t need to go to school for this, just be open to the idea of writing on any topic. This is especially true if you want to be a professional writer. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to make a career of writing about cats, but it’s very unlikely. If you look on any freelance website you will see all kinds of writing jobs listed. Will AI replace this in the future, perhaps. But the reality is that even if more writing is done by writing algorithms, it will still need some kind of human touch in the form of editing. Thus, if you can write on any topic, you can edit any topic. You will know what to look for.

So, the best way to strengthen your writing voice is to choose random topics and write. Write as many articles as you can manage. There is no substitute for repetition.

In closing, I hope this exploration of the writer’s voice is helpful. I hope that it has given you some ideas and insights on how to develop as a writer. And remember what Bob Ross used to say, “There are no mistakes. Just happy accidents.”

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