What is the difference between voice and style

An excellent article. Mayra, thanks for a really interesting article and for the in-depth, explanation of style and voice. The examples you used made the concepts come alive for me. An interesting take on style and voice.

For me, I first have to find my voice and then it helps shape my style. Thanks, Mayra. I had a question from a student that I posted last week on my blog and wasn't really sure how to answer the question. This article is a better explanation than my answer since I wasn't really equating style versus voice in the answer - I was trying to say this would be the author's voice but in reality it turns out to be the author's style to the way she would write a certain thing - I'm posting along with a reason for this to be better than my answer - lol.

Good post Mayra - I find that the author's voice is a subtle notion that often distinguishes the beginner writer from the experienced one - it's critically important to discover it. Mayra, interesting post and great references. Tone is how to use your voice in different situations. Your brand voice is singular, but you can use it with many different tones.

Separating voice and tone means you can be empathetic to your users. I think empathy is what makes the difference between just meeting user needs and really engaging them. Here's a simple tool to help guide your tone of voice. There are lots of different ways to approach the structure of your voice, tone and style guide.

This is the structure of a recent guide I created for a client, that might be a simple starting point to work from:. Start by telling people what the guide is for, how it will make their job easier, and how to use it. Give a set of simple, memorable statements that encompass your brand voice.

I always accompany each statement with a paragraph explaining it in more detail and showing how to put it into practice. Show people how to use that voice with different tones. Explain the kind of tones that people should use in different scenarios and provide examples. An A-Z guide including but not limited to: abbreviations and acronyms, apostrophes, bold, brackets, bullet point, capitalisation, colons, commas, contractions, dates, full stops, headings, hyphenation, linking, numbers and figures, quotations, spelling, titles.

Include sections on any specialist language your brand or organisation has to use. For every single rule or statement, you make in your guide, provide an example. Always make your examples specific to the organisation, rather than generic. There are lots of different methods for creating your guide , ranging from quick and low-effort, to more time-consuming and complex.

This is an approach that I took recently for a time-poor client. It meant they got a good style guide in place in under a week. I started with their existing brand guidelines and values and spent some time unpacking them and thinking about how they translated into a voice. Then I wrote up my conclusions as a set of short, definitive statements e.

Next, I worked on tone. I used their personas and top user journeys as the basis for a set of scenarios where the brand needed to use a different tone to connect with its audience.

After this, I wrote guidelines and examples of how to shift tone in different scenarios and for different users. Finally, I picked a couple of authoritative style guides Like this one from Oxford University and plundered them for the style elements, rewriting them in the brand voice and adding specific examples. There are a number of ways you can do this: my suggestion would be to incorporate a card sorting exercise. You might be familiar with card sorting as a tool in UX for organising information, but it can also be used for branding exercises.

In this instance, you would take a large set of qualities your voice could have and adjectives you could use to describe it trustworthy, fun, traditional, cool, measured, poetic, etc and write them on individual cards.

It will give you the basis for your voice statements, it also gives great fuel for discussion that will help flesh them out and make them feel more real to everyone in the room. From this point, you can write up an initial voice, tone and style guide, as per the steps listed in the light-touch process above. Click to continue. Every good story needs a nice or not so nice turn or two to keep it interesting. This week, let your character travel to another dimension. When writing about real people in historical fiction, what might the consequences be of taking certain artistic liberties?

Author Robert Lloyd discusses the ethics of literary revivification. Ambassador Philip Kaplan discusses how the characters came to him through the magic of the writing process in his debut novel, Night In Tehran. For the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, poets are tasked with writing a poem a day in the month of November before assembling a chapbook manuscript in the month of December.

Today's prompt is to write a memory poem. When you've kept your readers up all hours of the night turning the pages, then you know you've got a winning thriller on your hands. Author Wanda M.

Morris offers 6 tips on how to write a thriller that delivers, plus examples from thrillers to add to your bookshelves. Today's prompt is to write a nature poem. Journal entries, third person, written letters, oh my!

There are a myriad of ways to tell your story, and choosing how to move forward can feel daunting. Author Liz Keller Whitehurst shares the 4 advantages of writing a novel using multiple narrative forms. Write Better Fiction. Short Story. Now I know what I need to work on. Style is definitely what every blogger should be working on improving.

Good post; when I got involved with social and thought you had to drag a blog around when you visited other places, I really had no idea how much I would enjoy the writing. Glad you have grown to enjoy the writing aspect of blogging!

Looking for Something? The end. Quickest post ever. Just kidding. Finding Your Inner Voice Voice is a little trickier to put your finger on than style.

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