I have laryngitis. There is something going around Texas and it hit me right in the throat. I have been without a serviceable voice all week. Today is my best day of 2009 and I sound like a weary Rod Stewart.
All this made me think of the writer’s voice. A good writer has more voices than Rich Little. We should be able to write persuasively, diplomatically, formally, informally, and so on. We should be able to write information for experts and for laypeople. We should be able to write in ways that train and educate or ways that inform or ways that convince.
One difference between the person who think he can write (hey, who can’t write?) and the true writer is that the person who thinks he can write pretty much writes everything in the same voice. Whether it’s a note to a child or a letter to his boss or an explanation on how to fix a component in a complicated device, the amateur writer does it all the same way.
I have a test to see how well a person can write. When I propose an assignment of some sort, the first thing I wait for is the writer’s initial questions. One of the very first ones should be: “Who is the reader?” or “Who is the intended audience?”
Writing for doctors is different than writing for nurses. Don’t think that’s a put-down, it isn’t. They’re different jobs, different roles, and different points of view. Nurses, in the main, are much more involved in patient care, doctors tend to be more focused on the science or technology. Write about pacemakers for these audiences and you need to give nurses a different angle on the subject than doctors. Doctors may care a lot more about the components, technology, clinical studies, and competitive information on devices. Let’s face it, a doctor thinks about pacemakers in terms of technology and clinical trials–and in today’s litigious society, he or she may need to defend a particular pacemaker selection in court. Nurses care more about how pacemakers work and how they can best care for pacemaker patients. After all, that’s their main point of reference.
So how do you change voice? I think most writers do it instinctively, but here are some pointers:
- Read, read, read, read, read. Read everything, including stuff that was not intended for you. Read how experts write to other experts, how businesses advertise to children, how textbooks explain topics, and so on. Soak in the “flavor” or the mood of these pieces.
- Know your audience. This doesn’t mean you have to be your audience (a non-teacher can write well about teaching to teachers) but it does mean you should find out a bit about them. Most helpful are their main concerns, the things that most upset or worry them (their “hot buttons”), important issues, and their intentions.
- Get into the vocabulary of your audience. You may know some pretty impressive words, but if you’re writing a general how-to piece on installing a plasma TV, save your fancy verbiage for somebody who cares. Write using the words that your audience understands. Better yet, write using the words your audience would use if they were writing the article.
- Never sacrifice clarity for cleverness. Nobody cares if the writer is clever. Get over it. If you want people to applaud you, learn to juggle. A good writer is clear above all else. If you can be clear and clever, there’s no harm in that. But clear comes first.
- Know what your goal is. If you’re trying to be persuasive, you need to hit on emotions and provide some compelling reasons why a person should do whatever it is you’re trying to persuade him or her to do. If you’re trying to write a how-to piece, make sure you do everything in clear step-by-step sequence and don’t omit anything. If you’re writing an informative article on some scientific stuff, you can be a bit more formal…most scientists like their writing dense and footnoted. Don’t write that way if you’re trying to write an informational piece to senior citizens. They like their information clearly spelled out and, ideally, in large print.
- Avoid wayward editors. Some editors are great. A lot of input you might get on things you write will be surprisingly (and annoyingly) helpful. However, many people will offer you corrections that will only make your writing worse. A lot of times, people will want to change your “voice.” They’ll want you to be funny when you’re writing in a non-funny voice or they’ll want you to use big fancy terms when you’re writing to a lay audience.
The biggest trick in the book is expert-to-expert writing, and I’ll cover that next.
