Weekly Writing Challenge: Listen to the Voices in Your Head

When we send a post into the blogosphere, we want to make sure our best feet are forward. That means making sure errors like typos or poor grammar don’t detract from what we have to say; it’s one of the reasons The Daily Post highlights grammar issues many of us struggle with. (With which many of us struggle?)

Grammar challenges will follow up on grammar posts, calling on you to put your new-found understanding to the test. It’s one thing to read about the rules, but another to put them into practice.

To participate, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. (It would also be great if you could link to this post to encourage people to take part – the more the merrier!) Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight the week’s best posts on Freshly Pressed each Friday.
____________________________________________

Let me be perfectly candid and say that Daryl’s the Grammar Maestro in these parts. My approach to proper grammar is not unlike the Supreme Court’s approach to pornography: I know it when I see it. I’ve never diagrammed a sentence and have been known to leave participles dangling all willy-nilly, so I look forward to his posts as much as you do.

A Different Perspective

In the spirit of full-disclosure, at least half of the blogs I follow are blogs about dogs. While these blogs may focus on a certain niche reader, there is a common post type that I often see on pet-related blogs: posts written from a different point of view. Namely, posts written from the perspective of the blog owner’s pet.

It is certainly a cute post style to read, and to write. For example, one of my favorite blogs, Love and a Six-Foot Leash, showcases a weekly column written from Chick’s perspective, the blog owner’s dog: “Chix-A-Lot Fridays.” As a reader, these types of posts offer a fresh perspective and a light-hearted way to break up the regular style of the blog.

Writing from someone else’s point of view doesn’t fit with all blog types, but it is an excellent writing exercise that helps you to refine your word selection and stretch your imagination. When writing in someone else’s voice, the process is no longer automatic. Instead, you first need to “become” that person, and then write.

When done well, writing from another person’s perspective sounds natural. In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes about dialogue and the same rules hold true here: “First of all, sound your words — read them out loud.” Who knows what a dog’s thoughts, or anyone else’s for that matter, sound like? The idea is to not sound like yourself, and to sound effortless when doing so.

If you do choose to incorporate this exercise or style into your blog, it’s a good idea to make a clear distinction for your readers by using a unique title or preface. This helps to avoid any confusion, especially if you’re suddenly referring to yourself in the third-person. These posts are also an excellent option for a weekly feature, which can help to generate new post ideas and can refresh your regular writing schedule. If you’re writing as a fictional character, be sure to provide background for your readers. If you’re writing as one of your pets or kids, add some pictures for context.

This ability to stretch your writing so that you can express what it’s like to be someone else is an excellent exercise. Even if you find that it won’t work well with your blog in particular, I strongly believe in using writing exercises to help improve as a writer overall. Try it out privately or share it with a friend — it’s a lot of fun and can even be pretty therapeutic.

Have you ever written from someone else’s point of view on your site? If so, how did you incorporate it into your blog? If not, have you ever tried?

Blogging Voice: A Contrived and Shambling Hybrid?

I ran across a little essay by Maude Newton this week confronting the journalistic voice of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. Even in his sophisticated journalism, he often adopts something of a folksy voice, and Newton takes issue with it (or at least with the further adoption of a similar voice by other writers after the very smart Wallace more or less pioneered it). About the relationship between such journalism and blogging, she says this:

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception.

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two.

In a comment on a piece I wrote about style a few weeks ago, laurieanichols asked about the distinction between style and voice, and the best I could come up with was that you write in a given style to achieve a given voice. By choosing folksy words and phrases like some of the ones Newton calls out in her piece, Wallace is able to distance himself from some of his claims by putting up a sort of smokescreen of friendliness. This of course entices the reader to take Wallace’s side, in a way, and the friendly posture actually turns out to be a shrewd rhetorical device.

In my piece on style, I cited two examples of different styles deployed for different aesthetic effects, but we see here that the style you use to write in a particular voice can also have a profound impact on how the content (and not just the form) of your message strikes your readers. Some audiences will respond well to a severe, formal voice while others will respond better to something more casual. As bloggers, we’re generally tending more toward the casual, of course, but I thought Newton’s essay was worth mentioning since it highlighted another facet of an issue that had garnered some interest here before.