What Does Voice Mean In Writing

Mentor Texts

Writer's Voice: 'Intolerance and Love in Jamaica'

Ideas for helping students find and write in their own real voices, with an example from The Times's "Lives" column to help.

Credit... Illustration by Melinda Josie

Published Sept. 12, 2019 Updated Oct. 7, 2020

Our new Mentor Text series spotlights writing from The Times that students can learn from and emulate.

This entry, like several others we are publishing, focuses on an essay from The Times's long-running Lives column to consider skills prized in narrative writing. We are starting with this genre to help support students participating in our 2020 Personal Narrative Essay Contest.

Overview

A writer's voice is the way his or her personality comes through on the page, via everything from word choice and sentence structure to tone and punctuation.

In a personal narrative essay, voice is especially important since you are telling a true story, from your own unique point of view. That is, if you were writing fiction, you could invent a narrator, and that character could be a zombie back from the dead or a middle-aged trapeze artist or a six-year-old on a school bus, and each of those voices would sound different. In a personal essay, however, you are doing your best to be you, writing in a way that feels natural, and consciously revealing yourself to your reader.

Of course, we are all made of many "selves," and choosing which one to emphasize and write from is part of the art of honing a voice, and understanding how it relates to your audience and purpose. For instance, you might sound different when you are talking to your parents than when you are with your friends — or when you're in school, at your job, on the basketball court or at a religious ceremony. Similarly, depending on what you are writing and for whom, your writing might be more formal or informal: Your voice in a literary essay for your English teacher will likely be very different from, say, the voice you use when you are posting on social media or texting a friend.

But, especially if you are participating in our Personal Narrative Essay Contest, we hope paying close attention to how voice functions in narratives of all kinds can open up possibilities for your own work, and we hope the ideas below can help.

Before You Read

When do you tend to feel most comfortable writing? When do you think you sound most like yourself? Is it when you write in a journal? In a letter or email or text to a particular friend? When you write in a certain genre, whether poetry or fiction or essays? On your favorite social media platform?

Think back to a piece you've written, in any genre, at any point in your academic or personal history, that seems to you like it was written in your voice — true to the way you sound, and the way you see the world. What about the piece makes it stand out in your mind as a good example? What conditions do you think made it possible for you to express yourself so genuinely?

If no example of writing comes to mind, think about your "voice" as the way you express your personality in other ways, whether through what you say and how you say it, the way you dress, or through things you create. (For example, if you are a painter, a musician, a dancer or any other kind of artist, your voice comes through in your work.)

Finally, however you define "voice," how would you describe yours? What are its most noticeable and important qualities? For instance, do you use a lot of slang? Do you love "big" words? Do you tend to go off on tangents when you talk, or do you stick to the point? Are you loud or quiet? Funny or serious? Do you speak quickly or slowly? Are you self-deprecating or confident? What makes your way of speaking and writing unique?

Mentor Text: "Intolerance and Love in Jamaica," a 2016 essay from the Lives column by Bryan Washington

The editor of the Lives column, the source of this essay and many others we're using in this series on narrative, once gave a list of advice to potential writers, and one of those pieces of advice was, "Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself."

This essay — and the five others we include in the "More Mentor Texts" section below — all do that well. The writers tell stories only they could tell, in voices that sound natural, like you're having a conversation with a friend. They also make themselves vulnerable, writing honestly about their insecurities and their fears, even if many of them do it with humor.

Think about voice as you read "Intolerance and Love in Jamaica." Here is the first paragraph:

I went to the island for a family reunion. And while I'd already hit high school, I'd never seen Jamaica, so I flinched at the shouts once the airport came into view, and then again at all the clapping once we finally hit the tarmac, and I thought, So the hell what. We've landed. Big deal. But the lady sitting beside me squeezed my arm, as if to say, Isn't this marvelous. She told me she was home. She told me I was home.

What impression do you have of this person just from this first paragraph? What words or lines suggest that to you? Where do you feel you can "hear" the voice best?

Here is the second paragraph. What does it add to your understanding of this narrator and how he sees the world?

I'd heard stories about the situation for queer folks in Jamaica, but they were hard to put in perspective — I had nothing to compare them with. I lived in a small town in Texas. I'd have sooner set myself on fire than come out. I'd never seen a pair of gay people, and I had yet to find them in books, so the notion of a happy ending felt pretty amorphous. Like some pot at the end of this camouflage rainbow.

Now read the full essay, noting places where the writer's voice seems to you to come through especially well.

Then, if you are reading this in a classroom setting, you might take turns with other students reading the lines you chose aloud. Did any of you pick the same lines? Why do you think those were especially powerful?

Now Try This: Think About What Makes Your Voice Unique, Then Write Like You're Talking to a Friend

Take a look at just the excerpts we've included below in the "More Mentor Texts" section. Can you "hear" these individual voices even in the short excerpts? Which voices make you want to read more? Why?

You, too, have stories to tell that are yours alone and ways of telling them that are unique to your personality and perspective. Notice that all the essays we've linked to here take on universal experiences — whether love, family, identity, learning or ... shopping for pants — yet each writer stakes out his or her own perspective within it.

What makes your point of view unique? For instance, how does your identity — your gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexuality, where you live, what you're interested in or anything else important about who you are — affect the way you see the world? How do any of these influence your "take" on the topic you've chosen?

Keep in mind that while advice like that given to Lives writers — "Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself" — might sound scary, it is our experience, after a decade of running contests for teenagers, that as long as students keep in mind that they are writing for a family newspaper, taking risks and being honest on the page only improves their work.

For some examples, take a look at the winning pieces from the 2018 Show Us Your Generation contest. These students were all trying to express the same thing — what it's like to be a teenager today — yet each comes at the challenge differently, revealing something interesting and real about themselves in the process.

To practice, try this: Write a first draft as if you are telling a story to an ideal reader with whom you can be completely yourself, whether that person is a close friend, a respected mentor, or even someone imaginary you invent just for this purpose. Keep in mind that you don't have to actually show this rough writing to anyone, and push yourself to tell the truth about what you experience, think, feel, notice and wonder.

Another approach? Try telling your story out loud and recording it to capture your own unique use of words, as well as your cadence, the way you emphasize certain words or phrases, and how you naturally structure the story as you tell it. Again, tell it as honestly as you can.

Then, remember the useful adage that "writing is rewriting" and take this raw material and edit it. What works? What doesn't? Who will your audience be? How, if at all, does your draft — your tone, your word choice, or anything else — need to change to appeal to and make sense for that audience? How can you shape your writing into an essay that gets across a story and a message, but still retains what is unique about your voice?

Finally, have someone who knows you well read your piece. Does the final essay still sound like you? Ask them to tell you where, specifically, your real voice and personality come across best.

More Mentor Texts for Writer's Voice

Below each title, an excerpt from the piece.

"My So-Called (Instagram) Life," a finalist in the 2017 Modern Love College Essay Contest, by Clara Dollar

Like an allergic reaction to becoming unloved, my Instagram account went into overdrive, all aimed at one audience member: Joe. Through hundreds of screens, I was screaming at him: "I'm here! I'm funny! I'm at that fish taco place I showed you!"

"Why Can't Men Say 'I Love You' to Each Other?," a finalist in the 2019 Modern Love College Essay Contest, by Ricardo F. Jaramillo

I'm having L-word troubles, but my troubles don't involve a lover. There's no romance or sex in this. No flowers, candles or dancing. My L-word troubles are with my boy, my best friend, Kichi. I've told him I love him probably five or six times now, but he never says it back.

"The Terror and Humiliation of Learning to Ride a Bike at 33," a 2013 essay from the Lives column, by Mary H.K. Choi

I crashed into a fence. I crashed into a garbage can filled with extra pedals. I crashed into a woman whose jeans had a design that caught my eye. Evidently, staring at an obstruction guarantees you'll steer into it. I wish one of the teachers had pointed this out, because it seems important. Pro tip: Engaging your core does nothing. Bonus tip: Spin class is wrong.

"My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants," a 2013 essay from the Lives column, by Mark Maron

I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.

"Proving My Blackness," a 2015 essay from the Lives column, by Mat Johnson

I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on one arm at a time like every other black boy, but I was haunted by the moments I'd be out with my mother and other black people would look at me as if I were a cuckoo egg accidentally dropped in their nest.

Questions About Voice for Any Narrative Essay

How would you describe this writer's voice? Why? What do you imagine about his or her personality? What words or lines suggest that to you?

Imagine this same topic or story as if it were written in an entirely different voice, or from a different point of view. What could it sound like? How do voice and point of view affect a story or essay?

Where in the essay does the writing seem particularly honest, revealing or risk-taking? How did you react as a reader to those sections? What effect do they have on the piece as a whole?

What can you infer about this person from his or her writer's voice that is not directly stated?

What else do you notice or admire about this essay? What lessons might it have for your writing?