Use Your Voice!

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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