The Voice

The writer's voice is the pen and paper or electronic manifestation of a piece of the writer's spirit. The writer's voice can be subtle so as to be almost undetectable or it can be forceful and persuasive, a battle cry and a call to arms.

The word cannot exist without the writer and neither can the writer exist without the word. A writer must remember that he or she is a vessel, a means of delivering a message to an audience. Without the writer's voice, a written piece is merely a combination of letters arranged in a specific order. There is no heart and no soul. Moreover, a story or article lacking the writer's voice is also lacking credibility and a certain amount of trust of the audience.

Walter Cronkite didn't become the most trusted man in America by simply reading off a teletype machine. It was the little glimpses into his self, the relating to his audience on a personal level that elevated him from being simply a news anchor to being "Uncle Walter."

So too, must writers be able to reveal themselves in their writing, to relate to their audience, to not only be able to entice a reader into a story, but to hold the reader's attention.

My writer's voice is currently very much like my real voice. It's small and fairly quiet, but when it does speak up, it chooses its words carefully and makes certain that what it does say is important enough to be heard. It can run the gamut from compassionate to condescending, often in the same paragraph, tugging at the heartstrings one second and fiercely admonishing the next.

As a writer and especially as a journalist, I feel my first duty is to the public, to provide them with accurate information. But I would be doing them a disservice if that was all they were given. If I am writing a story about pet overpopulation and owner surrenders at animal shelters, the audience deserves to read not only about crowded shelters and euthanasia statistics, but about a specific cat that was given up and why, her name and her background story. Heart-breaking though it may be, having seen it with my own eyes, I feel obligated to properly convey it. Whether it's putting a human face on a story about the war in Iraq or putting s feline face on a pet-related story, personal experience acts as a megaphone, helping the voice of the writer to resonate even farther.

I admit, I don't have much experience and perhaps that's one component that's missing form my voice that I would like to gain. I know I won't be spending this semester delving into the depths of human suffering, sitting alongside soldiers in trenches or watching as rescue crews feverishly work around the clock to dig someone out of the rubble, but I would like to practice the art of the human element.

I would like to be able to find the balance between my own voice, the style and nuances that are uniquely mine and the voices of my subjects as they mourn and celebrate, laugh and cry, and live every day. It may be my voice, but it's their stories that are being told.