Your writing voice can be as powerful as your speaking voice, if you don’t kill it It’s as much of you as your face, hair, and fingerprints. But more importantly, your voice is how you stand out on the page. It’s what makes your writing sound like you.
The stronger you make your voice, the more magnetic your writing will become. When your voice is weak (or you kill it), everything you write will fall flat and flat writing doesn’t connect.
Below are some sure ways to kill your voice, followed by tips for strengthening your valuable asset. But first…
What is Voice?
Voice is you on paper. It’s like your vocal DNA that shows in the way you structure sentences, choose your words, and put together your paragraphs. It’s the unmistakable choices that make the writing sound like you. Voice comes from your personality, experiences, and perspective. It’s the total of your knowledge, opinions, and talents coming through on the page. Think of adding voice as the difference between reading a technical manual versus a tear-jerking memoir—both might have similar information, but only one embraces emotion and touches readers.
How Do You Foster Good Voice?
Developing a strong voice isn’t about learning tricks or formulas. It’s about stripping away the artifice and staying true to who you are. It takes practice. You need to write enough that you stop thinking about writing and start connecting. Good voice also comes from confidence.
The best writing voices are honest. They don’t pretend. They don’t hide behind fancy words or convoluted sentences. They keep it simple and speak directly to readers as if they’re sitting across the table, sharing a cup of coffee. If you find yourself trying to sound like someone, stop. Just be.
Fastest Ways to Kill It
Over-Editing
Nothing murders voice faster than over-editing. And this is so easy to do. We’re all our own harshest critics and that leads to an obsessive tendency to revise sentences and paragraphs ten, twenty, thirty times or more. Each pass you make with editing strips away the raw energy and momentum that gives your writing life. Protect that. Don’t edit it to death. Overthinking and second-guessing will leave you with robotic writing that sounds more AI than human. No one wants that.
AI
Speaking of robots, AI will kill your writing quicker than a blowtorch to paper. AI writing tools rob writers of their voices. They’re like vampires that drain the life from your words and replace them with generic, basic prose that’s supposed to appeal to everyone and offend no one, but that often isn’t the case. Readers can tell. They want a real person. An AI clone can’t stand in for you, or embody your unique perspective, or mimic the specific rhythm of your thoughts. It homogenizes writing until it sounds like everyone else’s. —polished but soulless.
AI Grammar Tools
One step down from AI lies their cousins, tools like Grammarly or ProWritingAid. They might fix your commas and subject-verb disagreements, but while they’re at it, they’ll do their best to break your voice. The problem is that they push you toward proper grammar and standard, conventional phrasing, removing all of your quirky constructions, snarky asides, and personality. They’ll flag your sentence fragments you might add for emphasis or rhythm. They’ll try to “correct” phrasing that stands out, but sounds exactly like you. And they nearly always suggest alternatives that may be technically correct but drain all life from your work. Use them carefully. Employ that “ignore” function often. Only change the egregious errors, like those subject-verb disagreements. Everything else? Make up your own mind. If it sounds good and flows, keep it. You aren’t trying to be perfect. You’re trying to engage as you. Keep the quirky.
Trying to Be Too Grammatical
This is a close cousin to the tip above. Effective writing isn’t always grammatically perfect. Sometimes you need to break the rules to connect. Sometimes you want to use fragments to set up a nice rhythm in your work. Sometimes you might want to start sentences with conjunctions or repeat the first word to establish a cadence. You can do this. Because it works. Because it’s how people actually talk and think.
Trying to Change Your Voice to Mimic Someone Else
Admiring other writers is fine. Studying their techniques is smart. But trying to write exactly like them is not okay. The whole point of writing is to share your thoughts, opinions, knowledge, and experiences. You can’t do that if you are imitating someone else. You will never be as good as they are at being them, so be yourself instead. Use others’ writing to inspire you and motivate you to get better, but not to copy.
Killing All the Emotion Out of Your Sentences
Emotion is the key to engagement. Without it, there’s no heart to your writing. The only types of writing typically relegated to an emotion-less presentation is academic, scientific, and technical. If you aren’t writing for one of those industries (for others within that industry), then keep the emotion in your writing. It is your golden ticket for building connection with your reader. Emotion is what makes readers care. When you strip away feeling for pure objectivity, you’ll lose any life your writing could have had.
Not Listening to Your Inner Voice
You know that little voice inside your head that says, “this sounds off” or “that doesn’t feel right”? It’s usually right. Trust your instincts. Rewrite it until it feels like you.
What to Do Instead
Listen to Yourself
Like above, your inner voice knows things. Pay attention. If a sentence doesn’t feel right, even if it’s grammatically correct, then it probably doesn’t sound like something you would say. Your inner voice knows your authentic voice better than any writing guide. Tune into those inner cues.
Write Like You Talk
Talk it out. I sometimes talk aloud while I write and transcribe what I’m saying. This works particularly well when it comes to scripts or any other form of writing for the ear. It makes sense that your writing voice is essentially your real voice on paper. It also tracks that the fastest way to find your voice is to write as if you’re speaking to a friend. Use contractions. Use casual phrasing (when appropriate). Let your personality shine through. The gap between spoken and written language is where many writers lose their voice.
Record Yourself
Another trick is to tell your story out loud first, then transcribe it. You’ll capture natural rhythms, transitions, and language that might not come through when you’re typing directly. This technique has a hidden bonus of bypassing your inner editor, allowing you to cut to your natural expression.
Write a Terrible First Draft on Purpose
Don’t edit yourself as you write. Instead, give yourself permission to write badly. And I mean really badly. You don’t even have to use punctuation at first, if it slows you down. Get over the need to be good all the time. First drafts don’t need to be good—they just need to exist. You can’t edit a blank page and the best writing happens during rewrites. So pour your words onto the page. Get your ideas on paper. Give yourself something to work with before you get critical. You’ll find that when you free yourself from trying to be perfect, your natural voice will emerge. You can fix any issues during editing. But writing is not editing. Keep them separate.
Write It Yourself—Without AI Assistance
Stop taking shortcuts. Do the work yourself. Put your own thoughts on paper, in your own words. It might take longer, but the result will actually sound like you. Even the best trained bot can’t do that. They can try, but that’s all it will be—an attempt to be you. The original is always better.
Add Some Energy
Get some attitude. Lean into your convictions. Be passionate. Show how you feel about things. Don’t be afraid of getting personal or taking a firm stance. Emotion and energy keep readers hooked. Bland and acceptable can’t compete with real. And restrained never inspires action.
Read It Out Loud
Your ears are your best proofreading and grammar guides. They will catch what your eyes miss. Plus you’ll stumble over those awkward phrases and unwieldy four dollar words. Whenever you struggle to say it, rewrite. Whenever you notice an odd rhythm, fix it. Hearing your words will alert you to 99% of the problems in your writing.
Don’t Edit as You Write
And for all that’s holy, do not have an AI grammar program running while you write. First drafts need freedom. They need room to be messy, experimental, and real. Editing while you write splits your focus and often results in stilted, overly careful prose that lacks personality.
Your voice is your most valuable asset as a writer. Protect it fiercely. Develop it carefully. And never sacrifice it for tools or techniques that promise to make writing easier. It’s not worth it in the end. Save those tools for other applications.