Today’s Blogtalk brings two very different writing-related blog posts to your attention.
The first post, “A Writer’s Voice Is All About Choice,” is by Mark Nichol with DailyWritingTips.com. My favorite quote from the article is, “Many writers are inspired by an established author who they model their own style after, but the key to success … is to discover your own storytelling style, whether you write fact, fiction, or poetry.” Mark goes on, in the next paragraph to outline some of the things you need to discover your own style. Among these are understanding your personality, your influences, family relationships, and background. Amen, brother! I would add that part of this process gaining a better understanding of your unique perspectives of life and — thus — your unique metaphors and language. I encourage you to read Mark’s post. Then, if you’d like to explore ways to enhance and control your writing voice, take a look at my e-course, Finding Your Writing Voice.
The second article is from *The Writer Magazine — “Writing in a Parallel Universe: How to achieve parallel structure in your sentences,” by Bonnie Trenga. Being the grammar-geek that I am, I enjoyed this humorous and well written approach to a topic that most writers would rather not have to deal with. She explains what parallel sentence structure is and then gives you step-by-step instructions for correcting non-parallel sentences. She even includes some practice sentences to play with.
You might be asking, “Why should I care? Won’t my editor take care of all this for me?” Sure … if you ever get that far. Trust me: making the effort to revise and strengthen your writing will pay off in the long run. Even if you never plan to be published, or plan to publish “only” for your family, your readers will have a more enjoyable experience if your sentence structure is sound.
Leave a comment. What’s your pet peeve (in others’ writing, of course)?
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* The Writer Magazine no longer hosts this article as of May 2017.
Finding your voice takes time, but once you can trust yourself, the writing becomes more authentic. I am currently writing memoir, as well as fiction (after publishing children’s books); and my biggest challenge now is writing from a male point of view (the main character in fiction) from his high school years to adulthood.
I enjoy your site; and hope you can take a look at mine.
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