Your Voice on the Page
Voice is rarely found in student writing, but it need not be mysterious. As the first-person narrator of a personal essay, you should think of yourself as an out-loud storyteller. You are a character on a stage delivering a monologue, and the way you talk says all kinds of things about you. Even the same lines read by different actors can have entirely different meanings. So yeah, voice matters. And voice doesn’t just live inside you, it’s something you control; it’s an element of craft. And that means it’s something you can work on. Let’s work on voice.
When you speak, your voice is distinctive thanks to consistent habits of word choice, sentence structure, pacing, emphasis, and emotionality. Your writing voice is similarly distinctive but probably not identical to your speaking voice. Since writing is slower, more deliberate, and easier to control than natural speech, your writing voice should sound a little different—as in better. In the same way that dialogue delivered in a play or a movie can be snappier than natural, unscripted speech, your voice on the page might be smarter or more entertaining than you are in person. This is good news for young writers who want to make a good impression in their college application essays.
Experienced writers will tell you that it takes time to develop your writer’s voice: You need to read widely and practice emulating your favorite authors, analyzing what they do to create specific impressions. Since you have, at best, mere months to spend on this task, I’m here to speedrun you to the finish line with a list of vocal habits that will serve to create voice. If you choose just one vocal habit, and repeat it two or three times within your essay, you will see its effect. I must caution you, though, that, like salt, a little voice goes a long way. Don’t overdo it. Choose no more than two habits that feel natural to you, and deploy them at intervals, strategically.
Use italics to show emphasis. The novelist John Irving and I both use this technique, as you may have noticed.
Repeat a favorite word or catch phrase. The essayist Joan Didion famously employed the phrase “I could tell you…” as a signature phrase.
Use foreign words. The novelist Junot Díaz blends English with Spanish and Dominican slang (like using tío/tía for dude/gal) to immerse the reader in the characters’ blended culture.
Ask rhetorical questions. Think of Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?” or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “How long shall we wait for justice?”
Use words or phrases emblematic of your region, age, gender, or social milieu. “When you’re running in the rain and the main character energy starts to hit”—@kerclarke, TikTok, 13 Mar. 2023—is an example of Gen Z slang.
Use swear words. Only if mild, and only if it feels natural to your spoken voice: Dang! I didn’t know I could swear in my college essay!!
Use original and memorable metaphors or analogies. My former student Chris, in their 500-word memoir, wrote, “Consider this assignment a three-partnered waltz between social norms, my personal values, and the risk of my grade.”
Use hyperbole. This is effective to emphasize a point. Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird: “A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
Use footnotes to show tangential thoughts or nested thoughts. Masters of the rewarding footnote, like David Foster Wallace and Benjamin Dreyer, put some of their best material in the footnotes, and in so doing, they have trained their readers to read them carefully. Dreyer, in Dreyer’s English: “‘Pulchritudinous’ is a not very attractive word for ‘beautiful.’ At some point when people like me weren’t paying proper attention it attempted, with some success, to redefine itself as “buxom”—“zaftig,” if you will, and even if you won’t—which, I suppose, if you prefer your women on the plumply bosomy side, makes a sort of sense.”*
* In Yiddish, pulkes are thighs, particularly as admired on a baby (or a chicken) for being plump. Perhaps some well-meaning Jewish linguist—don’t look at me—got pulkes and pulchritude mixed up, and this is the result.