Or maybe not your voice, but the right voice. What's the right voice?

Well, it depends upon a lot of factors. It depends upon your audience. It depends upon your topic. It depends upon the publication in which your article might appear. But first of all, it depends upon the type of writing you're doing. After you've established that, you can adjust for the other factors.

Web Writing: A clear, easy-to-understand voice should be used. This type of writing should contain no references to the author. Keywords or keyword phrases may be necessary, and therefore some repetition is to be expected. The pronoun "you" is often used in order to get the reader's attention and create a conversational tone.

Travel Writing: Whether or not you are writing for the web, travel writing often requires a voice that amps up the literary as well as informational interest. Readers should be able to "see" a place being described; a description should make the destination seem unique and travel-worthy. This doesn't mean that every description should point out the good qualities of a destination--a place doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful for travelers to want to go there (or for readers to want to "armchair travel").

The first-person voice may be used for travel writing in narrative scenes. However, the writing should not consist completely of personal narrative.

Reviews: Reviews should leave both the author and the reader out of the text. Constant Content sees a lot of reviews that are essentially personal narratives about an author's dining experience at a certain restaurant. When a food critic or movie critic writes a review, they know that it is understood that what they have to say is their opinion. For example, they would say, "This movie was excellent," instead of saying, "I felt this movie was excellent."

Ideally, reviews reveal the author's particular reviewing style - the voice they use personally for reviews. People read reviews as much for the writing and descriptions as they do for information about the movie. Descriptive writing that tells potential viewers about the movie, with plenty of examples (that do not spoil the movie for readers), will be of more interest and use to the reader than would a "review" that simply contains facts about the movie or the author's personal narrative about how the movie made him or her "feel."

Opinion: Opinion pieces are like reviews in that they should not consist of phrases that begin with "I think," or "I feel." Opinion pieces explain why the author has come to a conclusion either subjectively or objectively. The author should be able to supply solid examples to back up his or her reasoning.

Technical Writing: Technical writing should be clear, professionally sophisticated, and without personal opinion, literary flourishes, or extraneous details. Points should be made with the fewest possible words in a style that is easily accessible. The first-person point-of-view should never be used with technical writing.

Actually, technical writing and web writing are somewhat similar. Both types of writing should focus on clarity, readability, organization, and logical presentation of information. In some ways, it is more difficult to present a topic in a professionally sophisticated manner while still maintaining understandability of the piece than it is to write descriptions or narratives.

Scholarly Writing: Academic or scholarly writing does not need to present ideas in a convoluted or pretentious manner. In fact, it should not. While more sophisticated vocabulary and terms that are not a part of the everyday writer's lexicon may be used, information should still be able to be accessed by those seeking information from the piece. Granted, these readers may be more highly educated than the average newspaper or website reader.

This is not an exhaustive list of all types of non-fiction writing, but it does cover most of the content on Constant Content. Some types of writing are more successful than others in this particular content marketplace, but individual submissions are always more successful if the voice is appropriate to the type of writing being attempted.

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While there are various schools of thought about how subheadings should be formatted, for readability and professional appearance, Constant Content prefers one in particular.

Subheadings should be capitalized like titles and bolded to set them apart from the rest of the text.

For example, if your article is about tea, it would look something like this:

Types of Tea

Introductory paragraph.

Green Tea

Information about green tea.

White Tea

Information about white tea.

Red Tea

Information about red Tea

Black Tea

Information about black tea.

Conclusory paragraph.

Whether or not you want to double space between subheading and paragraph is up to you. However, capitalizing and bolding subheadings give your articles visual structure and allow readers to skim easily to the information they want most. In addition, this type of formatting also allows you to more easily outline and organize your article, and provides good points to include in your short summary as well.

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In the past, editors were diligent about rejecting submissions in which the short summary was taken directly from the article itself. However, this rule was relaxed because most authors were writing short summaries that summed up their articles in a way that was useful to customers searching for content. However, this rule will once have to be enforced because many authors are simply pasting their introductory paragraphs into the short summary box.

Why should you write an original short summary?

• Customers don't want to read the same thing twice--once in the short summary box, once in the long summary box.

• Introductory paragraphs don't summarize articles--they introduce them.

• Customers need to be able to make quick decisions about whether or not they want to consider an article; reading whole paragraphs slows them down.

• Short summaries should include a few sentences that highlight the main points of your article, explain if it is written for a specific audience (ex: females under 40, single men, general audience), or point out anything unique about the article that would be of interest to a customer (ex: list of academic sources, humor).

Most importantly, short summaries should be brief synopses of articles.

Please keep this in mind when submitting articles. Write original short summaries that are free of errors and describe your articles in ways that will be useful to the customer. Refrain from taking a paragraph from your articles - whether it be introduction, conclusion, or body - and pasting it into the short summary box.

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Lately, there have been a lot of submissions that have contained errors that should have been caught before upload. These include errors that a simple spell check or careful final read-through would have served to eliminate.

For an editor, this is especially frustrating. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the author to check his or her work for easily corrected errors. While your word processing program's spell check cannot be relied upon to catch every error, it should still be used. Spell check may help you to catch typos that your eye has skipped over time and time again.

For problems with homophones or wrong word usage that spell check won't solve, a final read-through is essential. If you don't feel confident that your article is error free, read the article aloud to yourself (reading out loud take considerably longer than reading by sight only--it will force you to slow down and listen to your words) or ask someone else to proofread your work for you.

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My thesaurus is one of my most-used reference books. It's a massive book with a usable index and my own alphabetical labels. I've had it since high school graduation, and it continues to serve me well.

One of my most given pieces of advice for writers who want to improve is to use a thesaurus. Thesauruses can brighten dull writing, reduce redundancy, and allow the writer to more accurately express a thought or idea. They also increase vocabulary, synonym recognition, and use of creative expressions. If you've never used a thesaurus, shame on you! If you've been using one for years, congratulations. Even the best of writers sometimes stumble on a word or turn of phrase and need to have their vocabularies jogged when they aren't offering the appropriate words.

While I'm not particularly fond of the reference.com set of sites, Thesaurus.com is probably the only really useful web-based thesaurus. It pulls lots of results quickly for the word in question and doesn't require you to leave your keyboard to flip through a book. I still recommend getting a gigantic paper-based thesaurus, however, if you really want to do some serious writing.

My advice about using a thesaurus comes with a caveat: If you think the synonym you've identified is what you want, but you aren't absolutely sure, look it up. There are very few true synonyms, as each word is imbued with its own nuanced meaning. Always choose the best word for the job.

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