finding my voice essay

How to Find your Individual Writing Voice

Finding your voice in writing is a crucial part of becoming an excellent writer.

It's what makes your stories, essays, and assignments unique, authentic, and recognizable. And it's how you infuse your own personality and tone into your work to craft essays that are as individual and interesting as you are.

But it can be difficult to define voice.

For some, it's the way you tell a story. For others, it's your tone or your feelings about a story. The most comprehensive definition of voice is that it's a combination of all of the things that make your writing sound like you: tone, feelings, perspective, and personality.

How to Develop your Writing Voice

It's worth your time to develop your voice in writing because you want your essays to be unique and original. People should read your work and instantly be able to recognize you as the author. These exercises help you reflect on who you truly are and what aspects of you define your voice.

1. Know Thyself

Duh. This one makes perfect sense. It's hard to infuse more of "you" into your writing if you don't know exactly who "you" are.

• Think about how you would describe yourself.
• Make a list of the first three adjectives that pop into your head.

If you described yourself as funny, outgoing, and friendly, are these the same words you would use to describe your writing?

Create a voice that is faithful to these words. Keep these three adjectives in mind when you're developing your tone. And continue reading to learn more exercises to build on adding the personality you want to portray in your writing.

2. Keep your Audience in Mind

You are probably writing for many different people at this stage of life. And the way you write changes depending on if you are writing for teachers, peers, yourself, admissions teams , or potential managers.

Naturally, your writing voice will adapt as your audience changes.

Think about how differently you speak to your friends versus how you speak to a teacher. You use a different tone, style, and personality.

This is the same for when you are writing. Your voice can fluctuate, but it is still guided by your authentic self. Try this activity:

• Take one writing prompt and write it for three different audiences (maybe try peers, teacher, and an admissions team). You can find sample prompts online or you can write a simple essay about what you would do if you won a million dollars.
• How does your voice change depending on the audience? How does it stay the same?

Certain parts of your personality will still be present in all three prompts. Maybe you incorporate humor. Maybe you show a great passion for volunteering. This is your voice.

Some aspects might vary. You might use more slang or a more familiar tone with a peer. You might be more formal with an admissions team. This is also your voice. It's just adjusting to meet the demands of your audience.

3. Listen to Yourself

Your speaking voice can help you discover your writing voice. The way you sound when you speak should be reflected in your writing.

• Record yourself having a conversation with a friend.
• How do you sound?

If you sound optimistic and upbeat, this is what you should convey in your writing. If you are sarcastic and pessimistic, this should appear in your writing voice.

Just as when your friends and family hear your voice and know it's you, whoever is reading your writing should be able to recognize the essay as yours.

4. Just Start Writing

Pick up a pen (or open up your laptop), and let the thoughts flow. This free-writing activity can reveal your natural voice. As your mind wanders and creates words on the page, you might see some patterns emerge.

If you need a place to begin, find writing prompts online, ask a teacher for suggestions, or find a passage you don't like and write your own version on how you would improve it.

• What flows naturally for you in your writing?
• Is there a certain style or tone that appears?

Writing without boundaries can help you see where your personality comes through. When you find repetitive styles and themes, these can lead you to a more specific definition of your voice.

5. Explore your Inspirations

Think about the people who inspire you. Reflect on their influences on your life .

• Who are your favorite authors? What do you love about their voices?
• What people do you aspire to be like? What personality traits do you admire in them?

Jot down a few thoughts about these people. Your voice can mimic the voices of these people whom you admire. Craft your voice in a way that inspires others as these people have influenced you.

6. Seek Help from Others

When you're completely tired of self-reflection, ask a buddy (or anyone who knows you) for some help. They hear your voice all the time and can sometimes offer some insight into your writing voice . If you have people who look at your writing often (a teacher or a parent), they can help as well.

• Ask them to describe you. What words do they choose for you?
• Ask them to reflect on your speaking voice. How do they describe your voice?

Use their input to paint a better picture of you. Their words can help define who you are. Let these attributes shine through in your writing voice.

7. Reflect and Revise

Once you have started recording some of your answers to the above questions and have tried some activities such as free writing, put all of these reflections, words, and thoughts on to a clean sheet of paper.

As you begin new assignments, look at this page. As you finish assignments, look at it again.

• Does your writing voice match your reflections on the paper?
• Would someone describe the voice in your essay with the same words you've discovered for your voice?

If things aren't matching up, it's time to rethink your writing. If you're a funny person, find ways to let your humor come out in your writing. If you're passionate about politics, make arguments that show how much you care. Look for ways to incorporate your writing voice into your essays.

Making your writing voice distinctive and unique is an important goal but it does take practice. Take time to evaluate your own writing style and use the questions and exercises above to create goals for the qualities you'd like to incorporate in your writing tone. Over time, you'll start to see your authentic personality start to peek through in your written work.

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What Is the Writer’s Voice? How to Find Your Writing Voice

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Sep 29, 2021 • 6 min read

Certain authors’ voices can be recognized in a single sentence. Novelists like Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Joseph Conrad each have a defined narrative voice that leaps off the page—an experienced reader wouldn’t confuse Morrison for Hemingway, or any other famous author for that matter. Many poets also have clearly pronounced literary voices—from Ezra Pound to Billy Collins to even the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Part of the timeless appeal of many famous novelists is their clearly defined literary voice.

Voice in Writing: How to Find Yours

Based on what I hear wherever I speak, it’s clear that beginning writers agonize as much over find their writing voice as over any other issue. 

Trust me, while it’s crucial you find your unique writing voice, it really isn’t all that complicated. 

You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the plethora of blogs , articles, and books on the subject.

Google “writing voice” and you’ll spend the rest of the day and night immersed in opinions. 

So let me make this simple. 

• What is Voice in Writing?

It’s your distinct:

• Personality 

It’s the lens through which you see yourself and the world. 

Your voice sets the tone and conveys your message in your own unique way. 

• How to Find Your Writing Voice

Try this exercise. Consider:

• The coolest thing that has ever happened to you
• The most important person you told about it
• What you sounded like

That’s as complicated as it needs to be. 

How it works and a personal (embarrassing) example: 

• The highlight of my life was realizing that I’d met the woman who would become my wife. 
• I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend, who happened to work overnight at a gas station. 
• I sounded as interested in my story as in anything else I’d ever said. 

After leaving my beloved, I drove nearly three hours in the wee hours, pulled into that gas station, and made my friend give me his full attention. 

I hopped atop a 55-gallon oil drum and told him all about Dianna—and I mean everything.

What she looked like, sounded like, how she acted, how much I loved her, that he would be in the wedding…

“Wedding?” he said. “Does she know about this?”

“She will soon enough,” I said, and for two hours I rhapsodized about a woman with whom I’d spent not much more time than that. (We’ve been married since 1971.)

When I climbed down off that drum I realized I‘d been sitting in a quarter inch of motor oil the entire time. It had soaked through my pants and down my legs. 

When I arrived home at dawn, my mother took one look at me and said, “You’re in love.”

My voice in this anecdote is obvious. I was smitten. 

You have an idea for a novel or a nonfiction book —but how do you go about telling the story?

What should your writing voice sound like? 

Imagine telling your best friend, “Have I got something to tell you…”

What comes next will be in your most passionate voice. 

You at your most engaged is the voice we want on the page. 

How do you use your own writing voice in fiction?

You transfer your voice to your perspective character . If you don’t know your protagonist well enough to do that yet, you have more work to do. 

• Examples of Voice in Writing

1. Hometown Legend   is a novel I wrote from the perspective of a football coach:

“Name’s Cal Sawyer and I got a story starts about thirteen years ago when I was twenty-seven. Course, like most stories, it really starts a lot a years before that, but I choose to tell it from Friday, December 2, 1988, when I’m sitting with my kindergarten daughter Rachel in the stands of my old high school. We’re watching the state football championship in Athens City, Alabama, almost as south as a town can be without being ocean.”

2. New York Times bestselling author of the Junie B. Jones children’s series, Barbara Park, was known for her sense of humor. She once told a fan, “I’m not sure I’m grown up enough to write grownup books.” 

From Junie B. Jones, First Grader: Toothless Wonder :

“Yikes! It’s a loose tooth! One of Junie B. Jones’s top front teeth is loose! Only, Junie B. is not that thrilled about this development. Because what if she looks like toothless Uncle Lou? And even worse…what’s all this tooth fairy business? Like, who is this woman, really? And what does she do with all those used teeth? So many questions, so little time.” 

3. Mark Twain wrote with a distinct voice. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : 

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. 

4. John Grisham is known for his legal thrillers. From The Testament (1999), written from the perspective of billionaire Troy Phelan:

Down to the last day, even the last hour now. I’m an old man, lonely and unloved, sick and hurting and tired of living. I am ready for the hereafter; it has to be better than this.

Whether writing nonfiction or crafting fiction from the perspective of your main character, your unique voice should set you apart. 

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How to Find Your Writing Voice: 5 Methods from Famous Writers

Published June 11, 2021 | Last Updated April 10, 2024 By Nicole Bianchi 7 Comments

When a reader says they love the way an author writes, they usually are talking about much more than the author’s style. For example, a fan of Ernest Hemingway might love Hemingway’s economy with words, but also the way he brings characters and places to life and how he views the world.

A distinct voice makes your writing resonate with readers. Even if you’re writing about a topic that has been discussed by others a hundred times before, your unique voice and perspective bring something new to the topic.

Readers who fall in love with your writing voice become your truest fans impatiently awaiting your next article or story. And once you find your unique voice, your writing becomes a truer representation of yourself.

Novelist Meg Rosoff observes ,

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

In today’s blog post, I’m sharing five methods you can use to find your writing voice. Let’s dive in.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Sound of Your Writing” Method

A few months ago, I wrote  a review  of Ursula K. Le Guin’s wonderful book  Steering the Craft (Amazon affiliate link). Le Guin’s book deals with the nuts and bolts of the craft of writing and the subtle stylistic choices that will help you take your writing to the next level.

In my review, I briefly shared Le Guin’s exercise that trains you to pay attention to the sound of your writing. This is a fantastic first step to help you begin developing your unique writing voice. After all, you can’t develop your voice if you don’t know what it sounds like.

Le Guin explains,

The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of writing depend on these sounds and rhythms… Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this primal interest in and love for the sounds of language. Others ‘outgrow’ their oral/aural sense of what they’re reading or writing. That’s a dead loss. An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Fortunately it’s quite easy to cultivate, to learn or reawaken.

Le Guin shares a writing exercise that encourages you to have fun and play with the sound of your writing:

I want you to write for pleasure — to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t ‘free writing,’ but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves — the sounds of them, the beats and echoes to lead you for the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like…Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

I love that Le Guin’s exercise is all about playing with language. In order to develop your voice, you have to take the pressure off yourself to write something spectacular. Experiment with your sentences, relax, and have fun. 

This leads into method #2 from Jack Hart.

2. Jack Hart’s “Relax” Method

I’ve written  several   blog posts  about Jack Hart’s excellent writing craft book  Storycraft (Amazon affiliate link). Hart served for many years as managing editor at  The Oregonian , the Pacific Northwest’s largest newspaper. He also guided several Pulitzer-prize winning articles to publication.

In this book, he teaches everything that he learned from his many years as a journalist. And he also shares his secret to developing your writing voice:

…The ultimate secret to letting your voice sound on the page is simply to relax and be yourself. Writing’s stressful. Sit down at a keyboard, and unconscious waves of tension ripple through your body. You clench your teeth. You tighten your shoulders. You tap your foot. And the words flowing through your fingers grow rigid and formal, stiffened with the frozen formality of an awkward job interview. When I’m running a writing workshop, I usually stop the participants halfway through their first drafting exercise. ‘Time for a tension check,’ I say, explaining that if their necks, backs, and shoulders are tight their writing will suffer. They loosen up, go back to work, and the clatter of laptop keys ramps up a notch or two. That change in pace is important. A relaxed writer is a fast writer, and fast writers sound more like themselves. It only makes sense. Writers who agonize over a rough draft, futzing with every word, will submerge their true selves in nondescript formality. When we speak with the natural rhythms of an at-ease conversation with friends, we reveal who we really are. Writing’s not spoken conversation, of course, but the same principle applies.

I love Hart’s tip to check in with yourself while writing and make sure you’re not tensing your neck, back, or shoulders. I too have found that my best writing usually comes when I am relaxed and writing quickly. 

This reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s advice in his book  Zen in the Art of Writing (Amazon affiliate link). He tells us to write our first draft with our hearts, not our heads:

The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today — explode — fly apart — disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire too?

In his book, Bradbury also shared one of his first steps to find your writing voice: imitate the style of your favorite writers.

3. Ray Bradbury’s “Imitation” Method

When you’re a beginning writer, you need models to guide you so you know what good writing and a strong, unique voice sound like. Bradbury encourages beginning writers to imitate more experienced writers,

I hasten to add here that imitation is natural and necessary to the beginning writer. In the preparatory years, a writer must select that field where he thinks his ideas will develop comfortably. If his nature in any way resembles the Hemingway philosophy, it is correct that he will imitate Hemingway. If Lawrence is his hero, a period of imitating Lawrence will follow. If the westerns of Eugene Manlove Rhodes are an influence, it will show in the writer’s work.  Work and imitation go together in the process of learning. It is only when imitation outruns its natural function that a man prevents his becoming truly creative. Some writers will take years, some a few months, before they come upon the truly original story in themselves. After millions of words of imitation, when I was twenty-two years old I suddenly made the breakthrough, relaxed, that is, into originality with a ‘science fiction’ story that was entirely my ‘own.’

Of course, a corollary to this is to read widely so you can be exposed to a greater variety of different voices. And I would add that you don’t necessarily need to only imitate authors who are working in the same genre as you.

You could be a fantasy author who loves the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle or a mystery writer who loves J. R. R. Tolkien. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s voice and often borrow his writing techniques as I shared  in this post , even though I have no intention of writing about the jazz age. 

Remember, though, that as Bradbury writes above, the imitation phase is just a stepping-stone to finding your own voice. Like Hart, Bradbury also encourages writers to relax and tells them to put up three signs in their work place: “Work”, “Relaxation”, “Don’t think.” He observes,

The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself…must ask himself, ‘What do I  really  think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?’ and begin to pour this on paper…Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long   period of time, his writing will clarify; he will relax because he thinks right and he will think even righter because he relaxes. The two will become interchangeable. At last he will begin to see himself… What are we trying to uncover in this flow? The one person irreplaceable to the world, of which there is no duplicate.  You.  As there was only one Shakespeare, Molière, Dr. Johnson, so you are that precious commodity… What do you think of the world? You, the prism, measure the light of the world; it burns through your mind to throw a different spectroscopic reading onto white paper than anyone else anywhere can throw.

In order to find your writing voice, you will eventually need to break away from imitation and explore the deeper parts of your subconscious. You need to discover who you truly are and what you want to say. To do this, you need to be courageous and confront your fears about what others will think about your writing.

And that leads into Marion Roach’s “honesty” method.

4. Marion Roach’s “Honesty” Method

Several years ago, I wrote  this review  of Marion Roach’s fantastic writing craft book  The Memoir Project (Amazon affiliate link). She illustrates all of her writing advice with captivating stories, recounting her experiences writing for  The New York Times  and NPR and her struggle to pen a memoir about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.

In her book, she talks briefly about finding your writing voice, but, in  an article  on her website, she dove deeper into this topic. Roach writes,

Your writing voice is something that needs first to be found, then deeply felt, then used to express who you are to the public…The bridge from here to there — from not having a writing voice to having one — is crossed when you confront your fear of being heard for who you really are…Who are you when you write? How is that communicated to the reading public? How much fear are you willing to confront to truly sound like you? Those are questions I want you to ponder. Because finding and valuing your writing voice is all about honesty, meaning that the road home is all about shedding your dishonesty. And the route from one to the other, of course, is blocked by nothing more or less than fear. Are you ready to make that move? Here is what a wise friend said to me recently on the topic of creativity and voice. It’s what got me thinking about this. I give it to you here since it’s not mine to keep. She said this: ‘We are only dishonest when we are afraid.’

To begin confronting your fears, you first need to identify them. Follow Bradbury’s method and answer his questions: “What do I  really  think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?” Start writing about that.

If you still feel intimidated to write with honesty and share your deepest beliefs, Damon Knight’s “persona” method can help you build confidence.

5. Damon Knight’s “Persona” Method

Damon Knight, an award-winning science fiction author, shared clear, no-nonsense fiction writing and general writing advice in his helpful book  Creating Short Fiction (Amazon affiliate link).

While re-reading the book recently, I came across this interesting exercise he used to find his writing voice:

Voice  is the distinctive pattern that makes a writer’s work recognizable. It is not, as a rule, the same pattern that the author uses in speaking, although it may give that impression. More often, it is the characteristic voice of the writer’s persona. When I was about thirty I experienced a sort of leap of confidence and capability; I was writing much more freely and productively, and I was writing much better than I ever had before. After a while I realized what I had done: I had invented an imaginary writer to write my stories for me, someone who was much more mature, more skilled, more inventive, and more knowledgeable than I was. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that other people knew about this and that there was a name for it:  persona,  which is Greek for ‘mask’— the sort of mask that Greek actors wore, putting on a role and a head at the same time. Since then I have found myself adopting new personas several times: once when I began writing critical essays, for instance, and again when I wrote the text of this book… You may well ask, how can you invent a writer who can write better than you do? It would be a sophistry for me to reply with another question, such as, how can you invent a character who does things you have never done? I don’t know if you will like this any better, but I am about half convinced that when you use a persona you are drawing on the ability you will develop much later — borrowing against future earnings. The other half of the time I think this is nonsense and that what you are doing when you call up a persona to write for you is just to make a greater demand on the creative powers of your unconscious. Another way to look at it is this: Suppose that in the course of a long story you find that you need to include a passage from an imaginary work by one of the characters in the story. Obviously that passage must be written by a different persona, because the character is not you. If you can do that in a brief excerpt, why not in a whole story?

This is a thought-provoking exercise that I’m excited to try out in a future writing session. In effect, it forces you to shed your writing fears, slay imposter syndrome, and pretend to be a more confident and experienced writer.

It reminds me of this piece of advice from Neil Gaiman’s  2012 commencement speech ,

Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.

The Takeaway

Ultimately, there is no quick and easy method to finding your writing voice. It is a long process that requires dedication to your craft.

Initially, you will have to put in the work to sharpen your skills, develop your style, and gain experience. Then you will need to overcome your fears and dive deeper into yourself. Discover who you truly are and what you truly believe.

Once you reach that point, you will be able to powerfully communicate your unique message to the world.

So relax. Experiment and play with your style. Write with passion. And let your personality and honesty shine through on the page.

Meg Rosoff advises ,

Stop thinking about your voice. Think about your life instead. Live. Take risks. Seek wisdom. Confront the unconfrontable. Find out who you are. Let your voice gain power as you go.

Thanks for reading! I hope this blog post inspires you. Which is your favorite method? Let me kno w in the comments.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to share it on social media or with a fellow writer who you think would enjoy it too. And if you’d like to support the blog, you can buy me a virtual coffee . Thank you!

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Jerry Pompilio says

January 11, 2022 at 10:30 am

Nicole, thank you for your response to my email. I like to say I have handle on this voice thing yet. To be honest I’m not. I will go into this article further. I will go out check the links you provided.

Your, Jerry

November 30, 2021 at 11:49 am

So other than taking breaks and using a form of copyist techniques long-known to the representational artist, all these authors could manage is “you’ll know it when you see it”, “what works for me, may or may not work for you”, and “this is the idea, but I don’t have a clue how to get there from here other than to repeat the question.”

Jeffrey Welsh says

July 15, 2021 at 10:52 pm

I have spent 40 years in a corporate environment divorcing myself from my own voice or any other voice to write every dispassionate technical corporate white paper that was required. I appreciate the common threads of these 5 writers. I hope I can rediscover the sound of my own voice in writing fiction. Not sure I can, but will give it a go. This was very helpful advice. Wish me luck. Thank you Nicole. Adoramus te Christe. Deo sit Gloria.

Nicole Bianchi says

July 19, 2021 at 8:50 pm

Thank you for your comment, Jeffrey. So glad to hear you found the article helpful! I wish you all the best as you write fiction. God bless.

Elizabeth Robinson says

July 10, 2021 at 9:36 pm

I look forward to learning from some of the best. Will try to make updates as I work the sites …

July 10, 2021 at 9:06 pm

I am enjoying the whole post am learning a lot . I always wanted to be a writer of all types of things . Non fiction I really need to work on. I thank you 4 all of the info u have left here to help so many… thank you

Fantastic! Thank you, Elizabeth!

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Writing Resources

Voice and analysis in your essay, the tour guide approach.

This handout is available for download in DOCX format and PDF format .

Several people have asked me what I mean when I ask for more VOICE in your essay. This is a great question, and it gets to the heart of what analysis looks like in a research paper. The goal of a research paper is to use the literature (your research) to support your own unique argument. This is different from a literature review, which simply reviews what others have said about a topic. In a research paper, there is some literature review, typically towards the beginning, but the larger goal is to DO SOMETHING with this literature to show your own take on the topic . This is analysis and it is what gives voice to your essay. One way to think about voice is to see yourself as the TOUR GUIDE of your essay.

Imagine a tour of a city. The guide's job is to take people from place to place, showing them things that make the city special. A mediocre guide might just say, "This is Westminster Abbey," "This is Big Ben," etc. They might provide facts, such as who is buried at Westminster Abbey, but they don't put any of the information in context. You might as well do a self-guided tour. This is the equivalent of a literature review: you describe all of the studies and theories, but you don't tell the reader what to do with this new knowledge. The EVIDENCE is there, but the ANALYSIS is missing.

On the other hand, a good tour guide doesn't just show you the buildings. Instead, they tell you about how these monuments reflect the history and culture of the city. They put the buildings into context to tell a story and give you a sense of place, time, purpose, etc. This is the equivalent of a good research paper. It takes evidence (data, observations, theories) and does something with it to communicate a new angle to your reader. It argues something, using the literature as a foundation on which to build the new, original argument.

Good tour guides (writers) insert their voice often. The voice can be heard in topic sentences , where the writer tells the reader how the paragraph fits into the larger argument (i.e., how it connects to the thesis). The voice can be heard in the analysis in the paragraphs as the writer tells the reader what has been learned and what it means for the larger argument. The voice often gets stronger as the essay progresses—especially since earlier paragraphs often contain more background information and later paragraphs are more likely to contain argument built on that background information. A good tour guide also:

• Doesn't tell the reader things they already know
• Doesn't over-explain or provide unnecessary detail
• Doesn't rush— if they move too fast, their tour won't be able to keep up
• Keeps things interesting (doesn't visit boring sites!)
• Keeps things organized (no backtracking to sites they've already visited)

How to use this in your writing:

Analysis is any moment in which you tell the reader your interpretation, how ideas fit together, why something matters, etc. It is when your voice comes through, as opposed to the authors of the articles you cite.

What might analysis / tour guiding look like in a research essay?

• Critique of the literature (methodological flaws, different interpretations of findings, etc.)
• Resolution of contradictory evidence
• Analysis of differing theories (in light of the evidence)
• Incorporation of various lenses, e.g., cultural or societal influences, cross-cultural similarities or differences, etc.
• Historical changes
• Fusion of literature or topics that are not obviously related
• Transitional language that connects pieces of the argument

Credit: Elissa Jacobs, University Writing Program

• Resources for Students
• Writing Intensive Instructor Resources
• Research and Pedagogy

How to “find your voice”

In my years of creative and communications writing, I have developed some practices that have become second nature in all of my work. Here are a few of the most useful habits I have developed to engage an audience with a persuasive voice.

Find your story

Decision-makers want to know who you are, how your experiences have shaped you, and how you plan to apply what you’ve learned to your academic career and future endeavors. That doesn’t mean you need to write about surviving a catastrophe or winning a Nobel Prize to have an impactful story. Think about specific moments in your life that have a “before” and “after” resonance. Are there events that signify a shift in your thinking, growth, or maturity? These moments of significant change are a great place to start.

If you have an epiphany story that is relevant, by all means craft your essay around that, but your anecdote does not have to include a “Eureka!" moment. In most cases, it is only in hindsight that we recognize our most significant moments. Those stories are always effective and persuasive, and they often highlight your ability to be insightful and self-reflective.

Make a list

Sometimes our personal stories are obvious; sometimes they require a little digging. If nothing springs to mind immediately, make a list of five to ten noteworthy moments or events that might serve as a source of inspiration. As you make your list, keep the following things in mind:

1. The more specific the better.

If you can pinpoint a day, or even a moment that things changed for you, it makes your story more compelling. For example: “The first time I saw the footage of the iconic protester in Tiananmen Square, I was struck to the core by his bravery and tenacity. It changed the way I saw the fight for human rights, and it was the first step on my road to becoming an international human rights lawyer.”

2. Avoid milestones that are too familiar.

High school graduation is a big moment for everyone, so measuring your “before” and “after” in relationship to it will not make you stand out as an applicant. Not everyone has a story of surviving cancer or meeting a Supreme Court Justice, so don’t feel pressure to come up with something historic. (If you do have a story of surviving cancer, definitely consider writing about that!) Think about small, subtle moments that had an outsized impact on you. For example: “As a camp counselor, I had to apply many band-aids and wipe away a lot of tears. Each time those small gestures made a five-year-old smile, a spark was lit inside me, and I knew I had found my calling to be a pediatrician.”

3. Talk it out.

Parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends, mentors, and teachers can all be valuable sources of memories and reflection. Take some time to connect with these people about moments that they consider significant in your life. You might be surprised by how much they have observed about how and when you’ve changed.

Use your muscles

Writing a first draft by hand is a great way to start a personal statement. Not only does writing by hand slow down your thought process, encourage more detail, and provide a permanent record of your first ideas, it visually embodies your specific identity. Unlike the uniformity of a computer screen, writing something by hand gives you an immediate visual reflection of your inner life. This will subconsciously help you to refine your voice! In fact, studies have shown that writing by hand encourages greater use of the right hemisphere of your brain, leading to a more creative process and better recall of details from the past. Bonus: you will also be far less likely to be distracted by social media, incoming news, or other digital tasks if you write by hand.

Of course, you will eventually have to transfer what you have written to the computer, but that brings the other bonus to writing a first draft by hand—a built-in second draft! When you transfer the written document to a digital document, you will find yourself engaged in your first round of editing.

Avoid clichés

“The grass is always greener.” “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” “It was a whole different ball game.” These time-worn expressions pepper our conversations and thought processes throughout the day, but should be avoided when crafting an essay meant to reflect individuality. They may serve as placeholders in your early drafts, but when you are revising and refining, try to think of ways around them. This applies to familiar phrases and descriptions as well. Avoid describing yourself as “goal-oriented,” or someone who “thinks outside the box.” Decision-makers have read thousands of statements making these claims, so ground your attributes in examples and original language.

Revisit, rewrite, revise

I’ve already mentioned that you will go through several drafts of your statement before it is ready, but this point bears repeating: you should not expect to write a personal essay in one sitting. Even if you are relying on a story that you have told a million times to appreciative dinner party guests, writing it down is going to be a very different challenge. Do not feel discouraged or frustrated if you find yourself writing and rewriting sentences over and over—it is the main work of writing. Give yourself a lot of lead time to write your statement so that you have opportunities to put it away for a few days at a time and revisit it with fresh eyes.

One of the strengths you bring to the application process is your individuality. No one else has your life experience, world view, or personal reasons for wanting to pursue your education, and that is an advantage. Figuring out how to maximize that advantage in your personal essay comes down to exploring which anecdotes best convey the story you want to tell—and that is how you will refine your voice.

Cambridge Coaching admissions coaches, like Alix , take a holistic, comprehensive approach to the college process. Well before you’ve even contemplated your college essay, they're thinking about the steps you can take so that you have the most fulfilling high school career possible. Our ideal time to link students with coaches is in the freshman or sophomore year of high school, though we are happy to help you whenever you are in the process. Whether this means pairing a student who is struggling with physics with an MIT Ph.D. who loves physics more than anything, or sitting down with families to discuss summer plans, we mentor our students through every stage of the process. Our coaches know what it takes to get into the best colleges in America because they’ve all done it. More importantly, they know what it takes to make high school interesting and rewarding, so that your essays, when you get there, will reflect the integrity of your efforts - and the breadth of your dreams.

Applying to college this year? Take a look at some of our previous blog posts below!

Cracking the College Admissions Process, Part I: The Search and the Setup

Have you finished your college application essay (part one), top 5 pitfalls to avoid when writing the supplemental “why college x” essay.

Alix graduated from Brown with a BA in Performing Arts. After spending almost a decade in Canada, she moved to New York for an MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University. Her award-winning plays have been produced all over the world.

Related Content

Table of Contents

What Is Voice in Writing?

• How Do I Find My Writer's Voice?
• How to Develop Your Writer's Voice

Writing Voice: What it Means & How to Find Yours

When you talk to someone, do you have to “find your voice?”

Of course not. You just talk.

Your voice isn’t something you “find.” It’s not hiding between the couch cushions or under the bed. It’s already there, inside of you and a part of you.

So why do so many writers talk about “finding” their voice like it’s a complicated thing?

Because they’re trying to look fancy and sophisticated. The fact is, it isn’t complicated. Elitist writers just want you to think it is.

Every Author has a unique voice, and you don’t have to do anything special to find it.

In this post, I’ll provide a definition of voice and debunk the myth that “finding your voice” is hard. Most importantly, I’ll show you exactly how to do it.

In writing, “voice” is how you speak and think. It’s all about the words you use and the patterns in your writing.

Do you use a lot of rhetorical questions? Long or short sentences? Slang?

Those are all ways your voice might come through in your writing.

Let’s look at a few examples of voice.

Tiffany Haddish is a comedian who grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. She’s made a living off making people laugh, without pulling any punches.

Here’s the opening of her book, The Last Black Unicorn :

When you read this, you can practically hear Tiffany talking. It’s like having a conversation with her. Her voice comes through loud and clear.

She uses humor. She’s candid, and she doesn’t always stick to formal, proper grammar.

Here’s another, very different example.

This is the opening to Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins, a U.S. Armed Forces icon:

David’s voice is totally different from Tiffany’s. But it still feels like you’re having a conversation with him. It feels authentic.

His tone is more serious, but it’s still friendly. His sentences are short and direct (except for that last sentence, where he uses repetition to make a point). David’s writing is emphatic, and it makes you want to keep reading.

That’s the power of an Author’s voice.

It’s completely and totally theirs.

It’s real.

It’s powerful.

To be clear, your “voice” is different from your writing style .

Your voice is about how you communicate. In any conversation, on any given day, you’re using your natural voice.

Style is about how you approach the reader. It’s either geared toward persuading the reader, explaining something to the reader, telling the reader a story, or describing something to the reader.

No matter what your style is, you’ll have a consistent voice that shines through.

How Do I Find My Writer’s Voice?

You don’t.

People with literature degrees want you to believe that your writer’s voice is something you have to work really hard on. They’ll tell you it’s something you have to develop over time as part of your craft.

That’s not true. Your voice is already part of who you are.

So, if it’s already part of you, why is it hard to find?

It’s not.

Believe it or not, you don’t have to find your Author’s voice. It’s your own voice.

You already have a unique way of speaking/thinking/talking. That’s your writer’s voice. It’s the same thing.

You’re probably just getting in your own way because you’re not used to writing—and because you’ve bought into the belief that writing is “high art.”

It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

Writing is about communicating ideas, not showing off.

You communicate every day. Trust yourself, and get out of your own way.

How to Develop Your Writer’s Voice

Your voice is already part of you, but if you’re like most people, you’re probably more comfortable speaking in your voice than writing in it.

If you find yourself in this camp, there are 6 things you can do to get yourself back on track.

To be clear, these aren’t tips for “finding your voice.” They’re tips for remembering you already have one.

1. Stop Trying to Sound Like Someone Else

One of the biggest writing mistakes is when people try to emulate someone else’s writing.

Don’t do this.

I don’t care how great a writer they are or how much you like their book. You’re not them. You’re you.

You have to be yourself because that’s who readers want to engage with. They picked up your book because they thought you could help them solve their problems . If they thought someone else could do it better, they would have bought their book instead.

Give readers what they want: your knowledge, in your words. If you speak to them clearly, honestly, and authentically, you’ll have a strong voice.

Chances are, you like the Authors you like because they stayed true to themselves. They stand out because they’ve let their authentic voice come through in their writing.

There’s nothing authentic about a copycat. And it only takes readers a minute to catch on when someone isn’t being real with them.

If you want to publish a good book , stop trying to live up to other good books. Instead, live up to yourself.

Let your unique point of view come through.

2. Stop Trying to Sound Smart

This is a subset of the first problem, but I’m highlighting it here because it’s something I see all the time .

Authors often try to use fancy words or complicated sentence structure because they think that’s how writing is “supposed” to sound.

Or, they think they have to “sound smart” for readers to perceive them as smart.

I don’t care how smart you are. No one wants to read complicated, dense writing. It doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound unrelatable.

I blame English professors—and textbooks, most of which are horrible.​They make people think they have to have some fancy literary voice if they want to be taken seriously.

But be honest. When’s the last time you’ve picked up a book in your spare time and said, “I really want something I have to slog through?”

So don’t make readers slog through your book. They won’t do it.

Complicated words won’t make you sound more authoritative.

Know what will? Good information, delivered clearly and plainly.

Keep your word choice simple and skip the “authorial voice” you think you “should” have.

People appreciate straight shooters more than they appreciate faux-intellectualism or headaches.

3. Stop Worrying About Grammar

The best way to write is the way you talk. And the way you talk won’t always be grammatically correct.

That’s fine.

Stop worrying about grammar, especially when you’re writing your first draft. In reality, grammar rules aren’t rules. They’re suggestions.

Grammar rules are arbitrary conventions that people agree on. Except there is no set of people who are in charge and no formal agreements. That’s why there are so many different grammar books out there.

There are only 2 reasons that grammar even matters in writing:

• It makes communication easier
• People expect good grammar (which is why it makes communication easier)

You want your book to look professional, but more importantly, you want your book to connect with readers.

People respond to people—not rules, and not grammar.

When you write the way you speak, people will connect with it.

Maybe that means using sentence fragments. Like this. Or maybe it means starting a sentence with a conjunction.

Maybe it means being colloquial. Did you notice that Tiffany Haddish said, “I look back over my life and I’m like, ‘For real, that happened?'”

Most grammar books would never encourage you to use “I’m like” as a stand-in for “I said.” But it sounds like Tiffany, and it makes her far more relatable.

Everyone has their own unique way of speaking. You should also embrace your own unique way of writing. It’s okay to break the rules.

Of course, you want your book to look professional, but you can always fix spelling and punctuation mistakes down the line.

Once you’re done writing, hand the manuscript over to a good editor , copyeditor , and/or proofreader . But even then, take their suggestions with a grain of salt.

The most important thing is to preserve your narrative voice and make a connection with the reader.

4. Stop Editing Yourself

I’ll take my earlier advice one step further: don’t just stop worrying about grammar. Stop worrying about how you sound at all.

Just get your ideas down on paper. Your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it won’t be.

Give yourself permission to write a mediocre first draft. Hell, give yourself permission to write a terrible first draft.

I always advise Authors to write what we call a “ vomit draft .” Spew your thoughts onto paper and stop worrying about whether they sound good.

Just get it all out. Get every thought that’s in your head onto the paper.

Like vomiting, it’s not going to be pretty. But it will be real. It will encapsulate your writing voice.

The more you agonize over putting your thoughts on paper, the less natural they’re going to sound. You’ll question your natural flow of thoughts, and you’ll probably edit out all the tics that make your voice sound like you.

Plus, it’s a lot easier to fix a second draft than it is to write a “perfect” first one.

Think of your vomit draft as a starting place that helps you drill down to the essence of your voice.

Here are 2 frames that might help you channel your own voice in the vomit draft:

• Imagine that you’re having a conversation with a friend. It takes the pressure off, guarantees that you’ll be more natural, and ensures that you’re thinking about what the other person is learning and taking in.
• Imagine you’re helping a stranger heal the same pain you had. This helps you focus on actionable advice and helps you stay focused on your reader.

Want to really ace this “writing voice” thing?

Envision yourself helping a friend through something difficult you’ve already figured out.

Why does this work? Because your mind won’t be on your voice at all. It will be focused on helping someone you care about.

Your voice will emerge organically.

5. Write Like You’re Not Finished

I just said that your vomit draft will probably be terrible. But in another sense, your vomit draft will be great . ​

That’s because it’s exactly what it needs to be: a draft.

Many successful people are perfectionists . They desperately want things to be “right,” and they have high expectations for themselves. When they write, they want every word to be spot-on.

Now, imagine if you put that much pressure on yourself every time you opened your mouth.

What would happen if every word you spoke had to be perfect ?

You’d never say anything.

You can’t have a natural voice—or a voice at all—if you’re hung up on perfectionism.

Every great book starts out as a bad book, or at least a mediocre book. I promise. That’s because writing a book is a long process. You can’t treat it like a one-and-done thing.

A book starts with a rough draft—emphasis on “rough.” Then, over time, it gets better. And better. And better.

I can’t tell you how many Authors I’ve seen who get discouraged at the beginning of the writing process. They let their fear get in the way, and they get stuck. They worry that their books won’t be “good enough” or that people won’t care.

Many of them give up.

It’s important to keep perspective. This is a process. Your voice will develop over successive drafts. It doesn’t have to be perfect right out of the gate.

Ernest Hemingway had one of the most distinctive voices in literature, and he was an obsessive editor. He was never content with his early drafts.

Stop trying to write like you’re writing a finished book. You’re not. You’re writing a draft. When you embrace that and loosen up, your writing voice will sound much more natural.

6. Talk It Out Instead of Writing It Down

An Author’s voice is called a “voice” for a reason. It’s directly related to how a person speaks and communicates.

One thing that makes tapping into your own voice so hard is that it’s hard to type as fast as you speak.

When you’re sitting at a keyboard, your ideas often outpace your ability to get them down. That interrupts your flow and makes the entire writing process feel stilted and awkward.

If you’re having trouble keeping up, stop trying to write. Talk it out instead.

After all, who said you had to write your book? You can speak it just as easily.

I recommend dictating your book and sending the recording to a transcription service .

With roughly 10 hours of talking and a few minutes of file conversion time, you’ll have a workable vomit draft.

Better yet, you’ll have a workable vomit draft in your own voice . Literally.

If you struggle with the idea of dictating that much content, go back to the 2 frames I suggested above. Instead of imagining talking to a friend, actually do it.

Have a conversation with someone else about your book’s subject, and use that conversation as your guide for your rough draft.

We’ve all heard of writer’s block , but there’s no such thing as speaker’s block. There’s a good reason for that.

It’s easy to talk to a friend. You don’t worry about sounding smart or needing to find your voice. You just speak, and your voice emerges naturally.

Don’t make writing a book more complicated than it has to be. When in doubt, let your actual voice do the “writing” for you.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, how do i find my 'voice' in my college essay.

Hey guys! I'm struggling to find my own 'voice' while writing my college essays. I want to sound genuine and authentic, but I'm not sure how to achieve that. Any tips or advice on finding my voice and making my essay truly my own?

Hey there! Finding your 'voice' in a college essay can definitely be a challenge, but it's essential for making your essay stand out. One way to achieve this is by writing as if you're speaking to a close friend or family member. Imagine you're telling them about the topic you've chosen and try to convey the same emotions and tone you would use in a conversation.

Another tip is to read your essay out loud to see if it sounds like you. This can help you determine if the words and phrases you've used are natural and authentic to your personality. If something doesn't sound right, revise it until it does.

Lastly, don't be afraid to show vulnerability or be open about your experiences. This can make your essay more genuine and relatable. For example, if you faced a challenge, explain how you overcame it and what you learned from the experience. Good luck with your essays!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

10 Questions to Find Your Unique Writing Voice

by Joe Bunting | 42 comments

Why is it that when you love someone's writing, you want to read every book they've ever written? Why is it that some readers will buy all of J.K. Rowling's books, even if she's writing in a completely different genre than the  Harry Potter  series? And for us writers, how can we go from “unknown writer” to “published author”?

It's all about your writing voice.

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Photo by BdwayDiva1 (creative commons). Adapted by The Write Practice.

What Is a Writing Voice?

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, you must find your writing voice. But what does that mean?

Your writing voice is not your particular writing style, although style is part of voice. It's also not the tone of your writing, although tone is part of voice as well.

Your writing voice is your unique way of looking at the world.

And the unique part is essential.

A writer who sees the world the same as everyone else has either lost their voice or never found it in the first place.

Readers lined up for the next Harry Potter book because J.K. Rowling has a unique way of looking at the world . She revealed a hidden world, filled with extraordinary people, secret wars, and magical creatures.

Readers are so impatient for George R.R. Martin's next book because he has a unique way of looking at the world.  In his world, heroes are killed, the bad guys win (at least for a while), and what's right isn't always what's smart.

J.D. Salinger has a unique way of looking at the world, as does J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, Ernest Hemingway, and so many other writers people love.

If you want to be a great writer, you need to find a unique voice.

How to Find Your Writing Voice?

It starts by developing your  sight . Here's an exercise to help you see the world in a unique way:

What Do You Value Most?

Morality is essential to every story, regardless of whether you're writing fiction or non-fiction. Even business books have a moral viewpoint (e.g. making money = good, waste = bad).

What is your moral worldview:

• What is most important in life? Family, love, courage, sacrifice?
• Do the good guys always win?  If you only enjoy books where the hero wins at the end, then this is an important part of how you see the world.
• What's  not okay  to you (e.g. poverty, selfishness, rape, orphans, infidelity, loneliness, betrayal)?  Write about  that!

People Watch

Next time you're in a public place, look at the people around you. Really  see them.

• What are they hiding ? What are their secrets ?  Everyone has something that they think if people found out, they would be rejected and excluded.
• Is he a good guy ? Is he a bad guy ?  And remember, even the villains think they're the good guy.
• What does she want ? What's stopping her from getting it?  A good story requires desire and conflict.
• Who does she rely on?  Most protagonists have a sidekick . (Most antagonists have a sidekick too!)
• What is their ideal place? What would be the most terrifying/uncomfortable/lonely/boring place for them?

Observe Your Surroundings

Setting is an important character in every story, whether you're writing fiction or non-fiction. Take a deep breath and look around you:

• What are your eyes drawn to?   If you squint, what do you automatically look at? Describe  that!
• How does what you're seeing make you feel?

The Secret Ingredient to Becoming a Great Writer

What's the secret ingredient to becoming a great writer?

The secret is that there is no secret ingredient. J.K Rowling can't help you. Neither can George R.R. Martin or Ernest Hemingway or any other great writer.

It's just  you .

YOU already have a unique way of looking at the world. YOU already have a unique writing voice.

You're not one in a million. You're one in six billion.

To unearth your writing voice, all you have to do is write word after painful word. Today is a great day to start!

Have you found your unique writing voice?  Share in the comments .

Ask the questions above. Then, after you've spent some time thinking about each one, free write for fifteen minutes . When you're finished, get feedback on what you've written by posting it in the comments section . And if you post, please be sure to give feedback to your fellow writers.

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Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

42 Comments

You’re so right, Joe. It’s writing day after day, for YEARS, when you really feel comfortable in your skin to BE who you really are. That’s true for both fiction and nonfiction. Wonderful insights, thanks.

Exactly. Thanks Marcy!

thanks marcy

That list of questions is incredibly helpful, Joe. Thank you for this post!

Awesome. I’m so glad it helped, Joy! Thanks!

Time is coming about like seashells running through space, and regardless of tabletops and napkin holders there’s very little in this world that’s going to stop it. Hell, there’s not much that can stop anything, let alone you. You are a monster truck, but that’s besides the point. Today’s story is brought to you by the letter J.

Once upon a time, and it was not that long ago otherwise this story would be stale and unneeded, there was a man, the God heroine prays to. He had a needle stabbed into his arm, flopping around almost like an accessory, with small lines of blood slowly running into the bandage he’d placed just below it. He was wearing a three piece suit, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, with a black watch on each of his hairy arms. He was almost bear like really; thick eyebrows that almost met but never quite had the chance to become lovers, scraggly beard that coated every inch of his face like frosting on a cake, and wild hair that, though an attempt had been made to contain it, was haphazardly strewn about the top of his head. He held a leather briefcase in his hand, and was walking just before the boundary necessary to call it a sprint. He kept glancing up and down at his watch, very much in a hurry. The countryside he walked in was idyllic; the sunset colors bounced gently off the slopes of the hills nearby, the sky seemingly ablaze with flamingo colors. A small town in the distance was steadily growing, revitalized by the puberty of the man’s perspective, and the crunch under his feet was growing steadily softer. He licked his lips; he was ready to make his move. He burst into a sprint, dropping the briefcase, and ripped off his outer jacket, spreading his arms out wide as he howled at the top of his lungs. He spun around in place, screaming and wooping, wiggling his fingers as if possessed and then he took to kissing the grown, feeling the gravel against his now moistened lips and loving it. He rolled around on the ground, arms and legs tucked in slightly, and he felt as if he was a husky, suddenly freeing itself to the morning snow. He took out his phone and immediately went on Twitter, going on and on about the sudden joy he felt, how every problem in his life seemed to melt away, dripping off the tabletop that was previously mentioned into a jar to immediately be used to pollute the ocean. But that didn’t matter; all was okay. He crawled towards the briefcase, panting rapidly, and flung it open, looking at the various folded up pairs of boxers inside of it. He dug through them like a spoiled child on Christmas, looking for the prize, the golden ticket to his escapade. At last, he found it, tucked under porno magazines and a suspiciously sticky tie; a gallon Ziploc bag, filled to the very top with cocaine. He screamed and wooped, grabbing it out of the bag and running even faster to the town, holding it in one hand tightly against his chest. When he finally got into town, he made a bolt for the fountain at the center of it, an imitation Michelangelo statue spitting half clean water into a basin where people tossed their hard earned pocket change in, hoping to exchange it for dreams, as if such things can be that easily bought. The man grabbed the bag with both hands, stopping short of falling in, then turned around and back flopped into the fountain. His back hit the outer rim, shattering his spine, and he collapsed into the shallow water, now partially paralyzed. This didn’t dissuade his joy; he just kept laughing and laughing, the bag’s contents slowly seeping into the water and slowly converting it into a pinkish sludge and producing a foul smell of vinegar. The townspeople say that, to this very day, the man still rolls over to the fountain and lays in it, breathing in the heavy fumes of nostalgia and begging God to let him relive something that perfect one more time.

Moral of the story: Heroin + LSD=fucking amazing stuff

Wow. This is so fun, Audrey! It’s so vivid, and I liked the way you played with all of these crazy images.

Thank you, Joe! Someone in my writing group that I respect a lot has been telling me he hears my voice in my nonfiction but not in the novel I am getting ready to publish. But my novel absolutely addresses what I value most! I think he’s is confusing my characters’ voices with my voice and is unable to find ME in them, but I am there which I think is the beauty of great fiction. You are there but readers don’t recognize you! Thanks for affirming what I already believed to be the truth.

I have a question for you Joe, aroused by this topic. You have all i’m sure read several of my practices where I go into dept on how i feel about a certain thing. with those practices i can hear my voice in it, and my words flow. when I write fantasy or work on my WIP that same feeling goes away. I’m not sure if i’m doing something wrong or if my writing voice simply comes in different ways when i write fiction. I’ve been thinking about whether or not fiction is my genre. I write a whole lot better when describing previous experiences of real life stories. How can I tell what genre i’m the best at writing?

John, a poor guy is in love with a girl named Shea. Shea, is very rich, and her father is in real estate business; she also love to travel around different places. Whenever, Shea leaves her home for a big tour then John never miss to follow her till her return. John, says that he can do everything for her, even if needed he can be slave for her. John is such a great lover that he has already did a lot of things for Shea, and not let her know about them. Shea loves to spend sometime with orphans, and she also donate them cash from her pocket, which is just amazing to see. Shea believes that no-one is poor or rich, but everyone are humans and they are alike. Her, heart is really too kind that she behave so good and friendly with her poor servants. Shea’s mother is no-more with her, but Shea always misses her mother. Mr.Justin the father of Shea also know that her daughter still feels so sad when she remember her mother. Mr.Justin is also a nice person, he gives charity to poor, and still feel very good about spending more on poor people. John, always thinks that how can he love such a rich girl like Shea, and sometimes when he compare himself to her, he feels that he is nothing near her, even he know that her servants are more rich than him. However, it is said that love is blind and it has no limits John still loves Shea even knowing all those problems. One day John is following Shea and suddenly she saw him following her; she stopped and called John “I saw you, now don’t hide yourself from me.” John was shocked and he stopped.

Thanks, for such a great article I’ve tried to write something from my side using 15 minute timer, it wil be nice if you give me some advice about what I’ve written. Thanks!

I have a question that kind of goes along with this: Do writers go through phases like painters?

When I think of beaches, I usually think of white sand and neon blue water caressing a shoreline strewn with seashells. However, the beach I came to love had none of these things. Its shores were dotted with clam shells and pebbles, the sand brown and sticky under bare skin. The water was a deep blue gray, the color of storm clouds before the first roar of thunder breaks. This beach was my escape, my paradise away from the harsh realities of life. It was on this beach that I was born, and it was on this beach that I would die. His name was William. His jaw was shrouded in stubble, his eyes sharp and cold. One could see more ink on his arms than skin. He didn’t intimidate me like he did others. I found him mysterious, a puzzle to pull apart and put together again. “Ruby, you can’t fawn over a man like him. Most sea faring men like him are criminals.”

This is wonderful. Pulls me in and makes me want to go along with her. 🙂

This is incredible! I want to read the rest of it.

Joe- your piece really helped me get a stronger grasp on my world view. Also, your remarks at Jeff Goins’ recent workshop were quite helpful. Thank you!

Thanks for sharing; appreciate it.

I love this article! It’s really true and very encouraging. I’ll have to keep all this in mind when I write. Thank you for sharing! 🙂

Thanks for the reminder, Joe. Sometimes it gets discouraging when editors aren’t open to the same kind of material they’ve always accepted. I’ve learned from the responses I’ve received from those who took the time, that it often wasn’t the story, it was the voice. An example is having an ending where the protagonist doesn’t win. It’s a hard sell.

As time goes on, and I “mature” along with it, my voice and viewpoint on life has changed. As a result, the markets available to me are different. The important thing, as you have alluded to, is to remain true to one’s own voice. Enjoy the worlds you create and fall in love with the characters that inhabit them.

I agree. “Today is a great day to start!”

These are really good questions, not just for us writers to ask, but also for our characters to ask themselves as well about the world around them, and the people that inhabit it. Thank you Joe!

Thank you for sharing excellent information. Your website is very cool. I am impressed by the details that you have on this blog. It reveals how nicely you understand this subject. Bookmarked this website page, will come back for more articles. You ROCK! I found just the info I already searched everywhere and just could not come across. What a perfect site.

thanks take it

I haven’t observed my writing voice before coming to your site, but this is a good information with us and next time I observe myself when I write try to listen so that I enjoy and tell another one. See this buy online assignment

She looked around her at the people in the orphanage. They all seemed like helpful people, and cheery, and happy, but but she is only new here, and once people know about her, she will never feel the same. She will never ever. The nice lady with spectacles led her to her room and told her that she will be sharing with some othrr girls, but all of them were laughing and playing downstairs. Then she asked her if she knew any other girls from the old orphanage. Lea shook her head, which made the nice lady with spectacles confused. After inspecting Lea’s face for a while, she realized the girl was sniffing and seem to hopd back tears. “You miss mama and papa?” the lady asked her. “I never met them,” Lea answered. “May I ask what’s wrong?” “She’s too sweet, ” Lea thought, but she didn’t reply and shook her head. What the lady with spectacles did then was pat Lea in the head and say, “You’ll have wonderful friends here, and of you don’t, I can always be your friend, and if you don’t want to see me, remember that being sad won’t make you happy.” The lady then excused herself and left Lea in the room. Lea then broke down and cried so much. She needed time in her old place to get used to how the children treated her, now she had to start doing it again, which was a very painful process. She wasn’t like any of the others and she knew it well. Once the other girls know about her past, they will surely treat her differently. She remembered the things all the other girls kept saying at the old orphanage. “Her parents must be very bad people. Why else would the police take a child once born?” “She’ll never understand a lot of the others here. She never had a family, whilst a lot of us saw them slaughtered in front of our own eyes.” “Do you think her parents were legal? Why else would they seperate the family? ” There was much more and more she hated. Lea then tried drying her tears. What will happen if someone opened the door and saw her lying there? But ot was too late, because she heard the door squeak. Written quickly on a small mobile screen so typos might be found.

Not enough description. Inaccurate child p.o.v If she’s a nice lady in our pov characters perspective, then we can assume Lea is naive, but then she says the woman is ‘too nice’. This starts the reader off with a dissonant view of your character. The flashback is a nice idea, however you could add grounding detail to enhance it and bring the reader to the memory itself.

I wrote this a couple of month’s ago, and reading it again gave me an objective view. I do agree with your opinion, you know. I actually feel kind of disgusted at it XD. Guess I’ll just need t work harder, right mate?

Thanks for contributing your important time to post such an interesting & useful collection of knowledgeable resources, that are always of great need to everyone. Please keep continue sharing.

Writer @ college essay writing service

Voice: Erma Bombeck certainly had it in spades. She could write about putting a roll of toilet paper on the spindle and make it sparkle with humor and wit. Her shopping list was probably entertaining.

What I got from this is… a witty smart-aleck. I read this three times and each time was the same. I felt like the individual was smirking as she remembered a past event.

I have been following this site for a while and this was the first article post that I have read here. I have created an interactive guide to find writing voice based on this. I hope it helps other aspiring writers. http://copyeffect.com/interactive-guide-find-your-writing-voice/

I don’t expect you to follow me or my paradigm, winnow, but I do expect you to honor your commitment. May your word be weighed against your actions in this bargain.

You know as well as I do that if the council becomes aware of our doings that my entire empire will be ruined.

The greyfolds would be on my doorstep and all that I have strived and sacrificed to build would be slowly dismantled piece by piece.

Don’t be concerned about my commitment to ensuring the success of our plan.

Winnow glared at Gizmon from behind her bangs as if to weigh his words.

With all facets considered, Gizmon had in fact put himself at considerable disadvantage and risk by pursuing this endeavor.

Winnow, however stubborn and defensive, had little choice in the matter and Gizmon knew this no doubt.

Perhaps it was his knowledge of Winnow’s vulnerability and desperation that aided in his trusting her.

Winnow turned her head towards the skylight above the courtyard in which they stood then slowly returned her gaze to Gizmon sitting on his mount.

This time her gaze was softer.

“ I will provide the vials” she softly admitted. “ but do not be mistaken Gizmon, if you try to turn on me, I will ensure you fall with me”.

Whoa! I like this a lot! I hope you continued with it!

John was an ordinary person in an ordinary town. Everyday he went to work, his ordinary work, and, after he finished his day, he returned home, his ordinary home with his sweet ordinary family. He was happy, maybe and one day he ended up asking himself “am I happy?”. It’s true: John was an ordinary person, but in his heart he was brave, he had dreams big dreams, but he had never tell anyone. He thought those were only repressed desires and he was scared of telling someone what he wanted “maybe they will judge me, maybe… maybe… maybe” and all continued to go and go until one day something happened. It was a normal day like the other ones, he was crossing the road in front of his house when he saw a little child who didn’t notice a car was going to kill him. he took a breathe and started to run, as fust as he could! He managed to push the child off the street but the car cut off his leg. An ambulance rushed and took him to the hospital. He was alive but he lost a part of his body. This made him think “I need to change my life” and after few minutes he decided to leave everything behind him. He left even his family. But what did he leave everything for? His big dream was to have the change of helping people, so he decided to go to Africa. It was difficult though. He was kind of bullied from the others but he took a decision. After few days he definitively left his home and everything else, he started a new life. Africa was beautiful: the landscape, the people and the work too! Everything seemed to be perfect. It was one year he was there, he missed his family and he sent them some postcard from his new city. After few months him wife understood his decision and accepted it. years and years went by and at the end he decided to come home, but just after the last mission: make the city free. In fact his African city wasn’t that free: he was controlled by an american multinational who slaved people and made them work for at least 18 hours per day. He and his best friend Abasi organised everything for months and citizens took part of the plan because they were sick of everything. The day came and when the sun arose they attached the factory and the guard. It took few minutes to make the city free again. He cried, everybody cried. He returned to his ordinary city with the heart full of joy: his ordinary city wasn’t the ordinary city of the past, everything changed and his dream came true. He was happy now!

I love the story! However, I think it could use more details. Maybe talk more about why he decided to leave his family, and what he was feeling as he did? Great story, and keep up the good work~

Wow I didn’t expect an answer after 5 months ahaha. Well thank you really much! I wrote that story in just 30 minutes so I didn’t think a lot about the details but it’s true that I could have written something else! Thank you really much! You have just made my day 🙂 I’ll keep writing (as I’m doing at the moment) and then maybe I can post my story here 🙂

This white room is the only I have left. Everything else I held close is gone. The people controlling this room have no hearts, no souls. Minds with wicked, twisted intents, and a wild evil grin plastered across their faces is how I imagined them for a while, like the evil scientist from a kids’ cartoon. But worse, keeping me captive and crazy, struggling under their thumbs, helpless. I bet every evil scientist in those cartoons would cringe at the nicest things that the people controlling me do.       I’ve always been that person that can get into the deepest recesses of people and manipulate them, but I didn’t do it for that kind of stuff. I did it to help people, to make them realize what needed to be done for their depression, for their anger, for their guilt. But I have also been easy to get to. I have been manipulated many times before, by the very people that I help. But never to this degree.      The people controlling this room are forcing me to complete challenges. Every day- or so it seems- they put new things into the white room, and I have to figure out what to do with them.         Sounds fun, huh?      In the beginning, it was just the white love seat, the white coffee table, the lightbulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling, and the ceiling, walls, and floor around me. All completely white. The ceiling is only about a foot or two above me, and it’s a popcorn ceiling. I have tried before to stand on the coffee table and peel through it, but behind the popcorn there’s pure steel. So no escape.      The lightbulb, which provides the only light source to the entire space, has never flickered once. It is constant with light, but it shines too bright. So I can’t stand too long staring up at it or my eyes will get spotty and weird. So I get really bored just standing in this too bright room, alone.       After a while, I start to get panicky. I assumed at the start of my time here that I would be let out soon. But many people, in fact,  just about all humans, are too quick to assume. We all assume we are going to be okay and everything will go back to normal, but once things change, we have to get used to them. Then they become the new normal. Humans are great adapters, sometimes.       Probably took me more than 15 minutes, but whatever.

Great Job! I would say the verb tense was a little confusing for me. Writing in the present tense can be difficult if the sentences are too complex. But awesome descriptions! I could see it all clearly.

There once was a girl, who felt the

deep desire to connect to the people of the world.

She wanted to feel the world’s

desires, fears, and injustices. But, she

questioned her abilities, constantly. Was she smart

enough? Was she brave enough? What did she really want?

Ironically, in a 15 minute free writing session to attempt

to define her voice, she wrote about how confused

she was. Was her voice feeling “lost and confused?”

As a journalist, this surely made no sense. How

could she tell factual, relevant, important stories

with a voice that was fragmented? To whom

did she owe her allegiance? What were her

passions? She always wanted to be

a reporter, so she studied the framework

to get there. But, where is the substance? This constant

desperation defined this person and consumed

her feelings towards the world and her

views. At 28, she could not define her

voice. She had no idea what she stood

for. Stupid millenials. Stupid society,

valuing individualism over family. 
Valuing careers over grandparents.

To be free is to be useful to the

world, to provide a service that makes

one feel relevant and needed. Perhaps

that never existed in the media-beast.

Perhaps it doesn’t exist in our

I wrote this while I imaging myself as a famous author in the future. Is this my writing voice? Journalist: Congrats, on your books! But may I ask you a question? Kevin: Go ahead! Journalist: What make you want be an author? Kevin: I got inspired to be an author while watching the Goosebumps the movie. I always like to imagine myself as a minor character or R.L Stine in the movie. Journalist: (Laughing) No wonder you like to write horror stories for childrens. What is your next idea for your upcoming book? Kevin: I do not have any ideas now but the ideas will eventually comes to me if I don’t overthink about it. Journalist: I do hope that your next books will be as good like that the previous book you wrote. Oh yeah! Goosebumps 2 is coming out at 21 September, 2018! Are you going to watch it? Kevin: I hope so too! What really? Never hear the news about it as I’m always spending my times writing stories in my room. But yes, I’m looking foward to watch it. The first movie is the one that inspired me to be an author so I will definely going to watch it the second movie and maybe it also will give me some more good ideas for my upcoming booka. (Smilling) Journalist: (Laughing) I know you will! Because all your fans are waiting impatiently to know what is your next upcoming book all about. Kevin: Of course! That’s why many people like my books very much. It simillar to the Goosebumps books. Every book contain twists, turns and frights. Journalist: (Laughing) You got a point! So I will be waiting for your next book. Kevin: Alright then. I also hope that my books can make into a movie. Journalist: I totally agreed with you! It will also attract many people’s attention to notice my books and read them. Kevin: That the whole reason behind it! Journalist: That is all the questions that I wanted to ask you. I have to go now and it so happy and excited to meet you in person. (Waiting to shake hands with Kevin) Kevin: I’m glad to meet to you as well! (Shaking hands with the journalist) After, the journalist left. Kevin got an idea for his upcoming book. He decided to write a story about a werewolf and the title will be “The Howl Of The Werewolf”.

Great Job! I would say the verb tense was a little confusing for me. But awesome descriptions iike! I could see it all clearly. Writing in the present tense can be difficult if the sentences are too complex.

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Thank you for sharing excellent information. Your website is very cool. I am impressed with the details given by you on this blog. It reveals how nicely you understand this subject. Bookmarked on this website, will come back for more articles. you rock! I just got the information that I had already searched everywhere and just did not come across. Is an ideal site

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Finding Your Voice as an Academic Writer (and Writing Clearly)

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One of the questions doctoral students and early-career faculty frequently ask is how they can find or develop their voice as a writer. As I think back to my early days in the academy, this is not necessarily a question that ever crossed my mind. However, in what seems a lifetime ago, I recall that one of the reviewers who evaluated my publications for tenure stated that one of the criteria he looked for was whether my voice was present in my articles. Thankfully, he concluded it was. Needless to say, I was grateful because writing did not come easily to me initially, and I certainly was not conscious of having a voice. Now, looking back, I attribute developing my voice in writing to a most unusual source. While chairing the university faculty grievance committee I was tasked with writing grievance findings that would be succinct, factually accurate, clear, convincing, and able to stand up in court in the event that a lawsuit was filed. It was in this extremely nontraditional arena for writing that I found and developed my voice as a writer.

What, exactly, is an academic voice? It turns out there is no standard definition. In its most basic form, some have proposed that voice “distinguishes between your thoughts and words, and those of other authors ”) (University of Melbourne, Citation n.d. , para 1). In a similar vein, Wendig ( Citation 2012 ) called it “a creation of that writer and that writer only ” (para 4). Others simply see it as a style of writing that is specific to academia (Everitt-Reynolds, Delahunt, & Maguire, Citation 2012 ). Alternatively, Potgieter & Smit ( Citation 2009 ) have characterized it as “our scholarly identity in our craft,” which involves finding “knowledge and understanding that is blended into our identity” (pp. 215–216). However, as MacPhail ( Citation 2014 ) has noted, there is simply no consensus about voice, despite the emphasis that is placed on it.

So, given the lack of consensus, how does one go about finding or developing a voice? In academic writing, it is important not only to present ideas, facts, and conclusions but to also have a point of view or stance. When you are able to consistently communicate that in your writing, you are using your voice. Or, as succinctly stated by literary agent and editor Rachel Gardner ( Citation 2010 ), “Voice is all about your originality and having the courage to express it” (para 5). To establish credibility, it is necessary for your opinions to be based on evidence rather than unsupported conjecture, ideology, or unsubstantiated generalizations. In some ways I think it is easier to express one’s voice in conceptual articles because, by their very nature, the writer is synthesizing literature, developing theories or conceptual frameworks, and perhaps most important, advancing a new perspective. However, voice can also be expressed in research papers, particularly in the discussion section as the writer makes the transition from the study’s results to arguments and conclusions. In doing so, Brown ( Citation 2014 ) has cautioned that it is important not to bury your voice in quotes from more well-established researchers. Although your ideas may be based on extant research, your conclusions should be based on your original thoughts, which clearly communicate your stance. It is also important to note that voice can also be expressed in one’s choice of research topics.

Developing one’s voice takes courage and practice. Courage is necessary because you will inevitably experience failure when your manuscripts are rejected or receive harsh comments from reviewers. It is extremely rare for new authors to have immediate success in publishing, and even after experiencing some success, you will likely fail again (Lisle, Citation 2016 ). But even in the face of certain failure, courage requires us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to continue trying, despite no guarantee of success (Brown, Citation 2015 ). It takes courage not to quit! As Lisle reassuringly tells potential authors, “May you have the courage to fail, because it is the courage to succeed” (para. 19).

We all know that practice is necessary to achieve skill in any endeavor, and it is no exception in the quest to find and develop one’s voice. MacPhail ( Citation 2014 ) offers several concrete suggestions and exercises to help authors achieve this. The first is to free write , which is simply the process of starting with a blank page (or screen) and writing whatever comes to mind. This does not require (or use) notes, sources, quotes, or data of any kind. Think about an argument you’d like to make or a position you’d like to take, and write about it, unfiltered and uncensored. Write continuously for a predetermined amount of time without stopping, editing, or rearranging sentences. Just use your own words. McPhail also suggests writing every day, even if it’s for a very short period of time. By doing so, you will be forming the habit of writing, and she proposes that one’s voice emerges through continuous writing. Another suggestion is to record your thoughts and arguments or use voice recognition software. By literally hearing your own voice, you can begin to recognize it in your writing.

In addition to practicing writing, it is also important to read broadly, deeply, and critically. Read in depth within your academic field but also read outside your field. MacPhail suggests reading fiction, biographies, essays, blogs, and magazine articles and being cognizant of the different styles of writing used for each. Read passages from your favorite authors and analyze their writing styles. What is it that draws you to those particular authors? What makes their writing compelling? Read critically. Analyze the arguments and claims made by various authors and make connections between their ideas and your own (Fitzmaurice & O’Farrell, Citation n.d. ). As you critically assess others’ writing in your field, think about how you will be able to use it in your work, and free write the ideas that emerge. Write first and revise later. As Silvia ( Citation 2010 ) notes, “The goal of writing (text generation) is to “throw confused, wide eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the words clean so that they sound nice and make sense” (p. 75).

And above all else, write clearly. Academic writing is notoriously bad, and according to experimental psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker ( Citation 2014a ), it doesn’t have to be that way. He decries the fact that “people who devote their lives to the world of ideas are so inept at conveying them” (para. 9), and he examines the potential explanations. Citing numerous examples, Pinker demonstrates the ways academic writing is most typically challenging, boring, and dense. By presenting complex ideas in stultifying, wordy, professional jargon, we make our writing inaccessible. This is largely because of bad habits, self-consciousness, and what Pinker calls the “curse of knowledge”—the inability to realize that the reader might not know what the writer knows (Pinker, Citation 2014b ).

Pinker, who is an uncommonly good writer, gives sage advice to academic authors. First and foremost, he advises us to write in plain English rather than academese or researchese. He promotes a classic style of writing that is conversational and clear. Although this style may not be appropriate for research journals, it will make your work accessible to a more general audience. In thinking about finding and developing an academic voice, we should strive to write with clarity and flair. After all, this is a skill that can be mastered, and if Pinker can do it, so can we.

• Brown, A. B. (2014, April 16). Hiding in plain sight: The problem of authority for academic authors [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.academiccoachingandwriting.org/academic-writing/academic-writing-blog/iii-hiding-in-plain-sight-the-problem-of-authority-for-academic-authors   Google Scholar
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• Fitzmaurice, M., & O’Farrell, C. (n.d.). Developing your academic writing skills: A handbook . Retrieved from https://www.tcd.ie/CAPSL/readysteadywrite/AcademicWritingHandbook.pdf   Google Scholar
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Frequently asked questions

How do i write with my authentic voice in a college application essay.

Use first-person “I” statements to speak from your perspective . Use appropriate word choices that show off your vocabulary but don’t sound like you used a thesaurus. Avoid using idioms or cliché expressions by rewriting them in a creative, original way.

Frequently asked questions: College admissions essays

When writing your Common App essay , choose a prompt that sparks your interest and that you can connect to a unique personal story.

No matter which prompt you choose, admissions officers are more interested in your ability to demonstrate personal development , insight, or motivation for a certain area of study.

The Common App essay is your primary writing sample within the Common Application, a college application portal accepted by more than 900 schools. All your prospective schools that accept the Common App will read this essay to understand your character, background, and value as a potential student.

Since this essay is read by many colleges, avoid mentioning any college names or programs; instead, save tailored answers for the supplementary school-specific essays within the Common App.

Most importantly, your essay should be about you , not another person or thing. An insightful college admissions essay requires deep self-reflection, authenticity, and a balance between confidence and vulnerability.

Your essay shouldn’t be a résumé of your experiences but instead should tell a story that demonstrates your most important values and qualities.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding your message and content. Then, check for flow, tone, style , and clarity. Finally, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors .

If your college essay goes over the word count limit , cut any sentences with tangents or irrelevant details. Delete unnecessary words that clutter your essay.

If you’re struggling to reach the word count for your college essay, add vivid personal stories or share your feelings and insight to give your essay more depth and authenticity.

If you’ve got to write your college essay fast , don’t panic. First, set yourself deadlines: you should spend about 10% of your remaining time on brainstorming, 10% on outlining, 40% writing, 30% revising, and 10% taking breaks in between stages.

Second, brainstorm stories and values based on your essay prompt.

Third, outline your essay based on the montage or narrative essay structure .

Fourth, write specific, personal, and unique stories that would be hard for other students to replicate.

Fifth, revise your essay and make sure it’s clearly written.

Last, if possible, get feedback from an essay coach . Scribbr essay editors can help you revise your essay in 12 hours or less.

Avoid swearing in a college essay , since admissions officers’ opinions of profanity will vary. In some cases, it might be okay to use a vulgar word, such as in dialogue or quotes that make an important point in your essay. However, it’s safest to try to make the same point without swearing.

If you have bad grades on your transcript, you may want to use your college admissions essay to explain the challenging circumstances that led to them. Make sure to avoid dwelling on the negative aspects and highlight how you overcame the situation or learned an important lesson.

However, some college applications offer an additional information section where you can explain your bad grades, allowing you to choose another meaningful topic for your college essay.

Here’s a brief list of college essay topics that may be considered cliché:

• Extracurriculars, especially sports
• Role models
• Dealing with a personal tragedy or death in the family
• Struggling with new life situations (immigrant stories, moving homes, parents’ divorce)
• Becoming a better person after community service, traveling, or summer camp
• Overcoming a difficult class
• Using a common object as an extended metaphor

It’s easier to write a standout essay with a unique topic. However, it’s possible to make a common topic compelling with interesting story arcs, uncommon connections, and an advanced writing style.

Yes. The college application essay is less formal than other academic writing —though of course it’s not mandatory to use contractions in your essay.

In a college essay , you can be creative with your language . When writing about the past, you can use the present tense to make the reader feel as if they were there in the moment with you. But make sure to maintain consistency and when in doubt, default to the correct verb tense according to the time you’re writing about.

The college admissions essay gives admissions officers a different perspective on you beyond your academic achievements, test scores, and extracurriculars. It’s your chance to stand out from other applicants with similar academic profiles by telling a unique, personal, and specific story.

Use a standard font such as Times New Roman or Arial to avoid distracting the reader from your college essay’s content.

A college application essay is less formal than most academic writing . Instead of citing sources formally with in-text citations and a reference list, you can cite them informally in your text.

For example, “In her research paper on genetics, Quinn Roberts explores …”

There is no set number of paragraphs in a college admissions essay . College admissions essays can diverge from the traditional five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in English class. Just make sure to stay under the specified word count .

Most topics are acceptable for college essays if you can use them to demonstrate personal growth or a lesson learned. However, there are a few difficult topics for college essays that should be avoided. Avoid topics that are:

• Overly personal (e.g. graphic details of illness or injury, romantic or sexual relationships)
• Not personal enough (e.g. broad solutions to world problems, inspiring people or things)
• Too negative (e.g. an in-depth look at your flaws, put-downs of others, criticizing the need for a college essay)
• Too boring (e.g. a resume of your academic achievements and extracurriculars)
• Inappropriate for a college essay (e.g. illegal activities, offensive humor, false accounts of yourself, bragging about privilege)

To write an effective diversity essay , include vulnerable, authentic stories about your unique identity, background, or perspective. Provide insight into how your lived experience has influenced your outlook, activities, and goals. If relevant, you should also mention how your background has led you to apply for this university and why you’re a good fit.

Many universities believe a student body composed of different perspectives, beliefs, identities, and backgrounds will enhance the campus learning and community experience.

Admissions officers are interested in hearing about how your unique background, identity, beliefs, culture, or characteristics will enrich the campus community, which is why they assign a diversity essay .

In addition to your main college essay , some schools and scholarships may ask for a supplementary essay focused on an aspect of your identity or background. This is sometimes called a diversity essay .

You can use humor in a college essay , but carefully consider its purpose and use it wisely. An effective use of humor involves unexpected, keen observations of the everyday, or speaks to a deeper theme. Humor shouldn’t be the main focus of the essay, but rather a tool to improve your storytelling.

Get a second opinion from a teacher, counselor, or essay coach on whether your essay’s humor is appropriate.

Though admissions officers are interested in hearing your story, they’re also interested in how you tell it. An exceptionally written essay will differentiate you from other applicants, meaning that admissions officers will spend more time reading it.

You can use literary devices to catch your reader’s attention and enrich your storytelling; however, focus on using just a few devices well, rather than trying to use as many as possible.

To decide on a good college essay topic , spend time thoughtfully answering brainstorming questions. If you still have trouble identifying topics, try the following two strategies:

• Identify your qualities → Brainstorm stories that demonstrate these qualities
• Identify memorable stories → Connect your qualities to these stories

You can also ask family, friends, or mentors to help you brainstorm topics, give feedback on your potential essay topics, or recall key stories that showcase your qualities.

Yes—admissions officers don’t expect everyone to have a totally unique college essay topic . But you must differentiate your essay from others by having a surprising story arc, an interesting insight, and/or an advanced writing style .

There are no foolproof college essay topics —whatever your topic, the key is to write about it effectively. However, a good topic

• Is meaningful, specific, and personal to you
• Focuses on you and your experiences
• Reveals something beyond your test scores, grades, and extracurriculars
• Is creative and original

Unlike a five-paragraph essay, your admissions essay should not end by summarizing the points you’ve already made. It’s better to be creative and aim for a strong final impression.

You should also avoid stating the obvious (for example, saying that you hope to be accepted).

There are a few strategies you can use for a memorable ending to your college essay :

• Return to the beginning with a “full circle” structure
• Reveal the main point or insight in your story
• Look to the future
• End on an action

The best technique will depend on your topic choice, essay outline, and writing style. You can write several endings using different techniques to see which works best.

College deadlines vary depending on the schools you’re applying to and your application plan:

• For early action applications and the first round of early decision applications, the deadline is on November 1 or 15. Decisions are released by mid-December.
• For the second round of early decision applications, the deadline is January 1 or 15. Decisions are released in January or February.
• Regular decision deadlines usually fall between late November and mid-March, and decisions are released in March or April.
• Rolling admission deadlines run from July to April, and decisions are released around four to eight weeks after submission.

Depending on your prospective schools’ requirements, you may need to submit scores for the SAT or ACT as part of your college application .

Some schools now no longer require students to submit test scores; however, you should still take the SAT or ACT and aim to get a high score to strengthen your application package.

Aim to take the SAT or ACT in the spring of your junior year to give yourself enough time to retake it in the fall of your senior year if necessary.

Apply early for federal student aid and application fee waivers. You can also look for scholarships from schools, corporations, and charitable foundations.

To maximize your options, you should aim to apply to about eight schools:

• Two reach schools that might be difficult to get into
• Four match schools that you have a good chance of getting into
• Two safety schools that you feel confident you’ll get into

The college admissions essay accounts for roughly 25% of the weight of your application .

At highly selective schools, there are four qualified candidates for every spot. While your academic achievements are important, your college admissions essay can help you stand out from other applicants with similar profiles.

In general, for your college application you will need to submit all of the following:

• Your personal information
• List of extracurriculars and awards
• College application essays
• Transcripts
• Standardized test scores
• Recommendation letters.

Different colleges may have specific requirements, so make sure you check exactly what’s expected in the application guidance.

You should start thinking about your college applications the summer before your junior year to give you sufficient time for college visits, taking standardized tests, applying for financial aid , writing essays, and collecting application material.

Yes, but make sure your essay directly addresses the prompt, respects the word count , and demonstrates the organization’s values.

If you plan ahead, you can save time by writing one scholarship essay for multiple prompts with similar questions. In a scholarship tracker spreadsheet, you can group or color-code overlapping essay prompts; then, write a single essay for multiple scholarships. Sometimes, you can even reuse or adapt your main college essay .

You can start applying for scholarships as early as your junior year. Continue applying throughout your senior year.

Invest time in applying for various scholarships , especially local ones with small dollar amounts, which are likely easier to win and more reflective of your background and interests. It will be easier for you to write an authentic and compelling essay if the scholarship topic is meaningful to you.

You can find scholarships through your school counselor, community network, or an internet search.

A scholarship essay requires you to demonstrate your values and qualities while answering the prompt’s specific question.

After researching the scholarship organization, identify a personal experience that embodies its values and exemplifies how you will be a successful student.

A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

While timelines will differ depending on the student, plan on spending at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing the first draft of your college admissions essay , and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Don’t forget to save enough time for breaks between each writing and editing stage.

You should already begin thinking about your essay the summer before your senior year so that you have plenty of time to try out different topics and get feedback on what works.

Your college essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s weight. It may be the deciding factor in whether you’re accepted, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurricular track records.

In most cases, quoting other people isn’t a good way to start your college essay . Admissions officers want to hear your thoughts about yourself, and quotes often don’t achieve that. Unless a quote truly adds something important to your essay that it otherwise wouldn’t have, you probably shouldn’t include it.

Cliché openers in a college essay introduction are usually general and applicable to many students and situations. Most successful introductions are specific: they only work for the unique essay that follows.

The key to a strong college essay introduction is not to give too much away. Try to start with a surprising statement or image that raises questions and compels the reader to find out more.

The introduction of your college essay is the first thing admissions officers will read and therefore your most important opportunity to stand out. An excellent introduction will keep admissions officers reading, allowing you to tell them what you want them to know.

You can speed up this process by shortening and smoothing your writing with a paraphrasing tool . After that, you can use the summarizer to shorten it even more.

If you’re struggling to reach the word count for your college essay, add vivid personal stories or share your feelings and insight to give your essay more depth and authenticity.

Most college application portals specify a word count range for your essay, and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit to write a developed and thoughtful essay.

You should aim to stay under the specified word count limit to show you can follow directions and write concisely. However, don’t write too little, as it may seem like you are unwilling or unable to write a detailed and insightful narrative about yourself.

If no word count is specified, we advise keeping your essay between 400 and 600 words.

In your application essay , admissions officers are looking for particular features : they want to see context on your background, positive traits that you could bring to campus, and examples of you demonstrating those qualities.

Colleges want to be able to differentiate students who seem similar on paper. In the college application essay , they’re looking for a way to understand each applicant’s unique personality and experiences.

You don’t need a title for your college admissions essay , but you can include one if you think it adds something important.

Your college essay’s format should be as simple as possible:

• Use a standard, readable font
• Use 1.5 or double spacing
• If attaching a file, save it as a PDF
• Stick to the word count
• Avoid unusual formatting and unnecessary decorative touches

There are no set rules for how to structure a college application essay , but these are two common structures that work:

• A montage structure, a series of vignettes with a common theme.
• A narrative structure, a single story that shows your personal growth or how you overcame a challenge.

Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in high school.

Campus visits are always helpful, but if you can’t make it in person, the college website will have plenty of information for you to explore. You should look through the course catalog and even reach out to current faculty with any questions about the school.

Colleges set a “Why this college?” essay because they want to see that you’ve done your research. You must prove that you know what makes the school unique and can connect that to your own personal goals and academic interests.

Depending on your writing, you may go through several rounds of revision . Make sure to put aside your essay for a little while after each editing stage to return with a fresh perspective.

Teachers and guidance counselors can help you check your language, tone, and content . Ask for their help at least one to two months before the submission deadline, as many other students will also want their help.

Friends and family are a good resource to check for authenticity. It’s best to seek help from family members with a strong writing or English educational background, or from older siblings and cousins who have been through the college admissions process.

If possible, get help from an essay coach or editor ; they’ll have specialized knowledge of college admissions essays and be able to give objective expert feedback.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Include specific, personal details and use your authentic voice to shed a new perspective on a common human experience.

Through specific stories, you can weave your achievements and qualities into your essay so that it doesn’t seem like you’re bragging from a resume.

When writing about yourself , including difficult experiences or failures can be a great way to show vulnerability and authenticity, but be careful not to overshare, and focus on showing how you matured from the experience.

First, spend time reflecting on your core values and character . You can start with these questions:

• What are three words your friends or family would use to describe you, and why would they choose them?
• Whom do you admire most and why?
• What are you most proud of? Ashamed of?

However, you should do a comprehensive brainstorming session to fully understand your values. Also consider how your values and goals match your prospective university’s program and culture. Then, brainstorm stories that illustrate the fit between the two.

In a college application essay , you can occasionally bend grammatical rules if doing so adds value to the storytelling process and the essay maintains clarity.

However, use standard language rules if your stylistic choices would otherwise distract the reader from your overall narrative or could be easily interpreted as unintentional errors.

Write concisely and use the active voice to maintain a quick pace throughout your essay and make sure it’s the right length . Avoid adding definitions unless they provide necessary explanation.

If you’re an international student applying to a US college and you’re comfortable using American idioms or cultural references , you can. But instead of potentially using them incorrectly, don’t be afraid to write in detail about yourself within your own culture.

Provide context for any words, customs, or places that an American admissions officer might be unfamiliar with.

College application essays are less formal than other kinds of academic writing . Use a conversational yet respectful tone , as if speaking with a teacher or mentor. Be vulnerable about your feelings, thoughts, and experiences to connect with the reader.

Aim to write in your authentic voice , with a style that sounds natural and genuine. You can be creative with your word choice, but don’t use elaborate vocabulary to impress admissions officers.

Admissions officers use college admissions essays to evaluate your character, writing skills , and ability to self-reflect . The essay is your chance to show what you will add to the academic community.

The college essay may be the deciding factor in your application , especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

Some colleges also require supplemental essays about specific topics, such as why you chose that specific college . Scholarship essays are often required to obtain financial aid .

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September 20, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication, finding your voice.

How one writer discovered his when he stopped looking for it and learned instead to listen

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, I discovered a language lab that nobody used. In it I could listen to foreign-language conversations or popular poets of the day reading their own words. The recordings were 78-rpm records, large as dinner plates—a common medium of the time along with saucer-sized 45s and reel-to-reel tapes. Did nobody use the lab because half its contents were recordings of poets? In its sheltered precincts, in a deeper isolation induced by heavy 1960s headphones, I listened to Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, and the fiction writer Eudora Welty.

Hearing their voices, and having heard Frost and Roethke read in person, I told myself I would like to write like them. I felt the same about Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin and William Maxwell: I’d like to write like him . I was 19 and later on, older and wiser, perhaps, I sensed I didn’t want to write like any of that crew. I wanted to write like me. The sound of the headphone voices, however, added an internal dimension, I now recognize, to the developing voice I came to identify as my own.

When I was in college, what we now call a writer’s voice was generally called style . Develop a style, writing instructors would say. And by that they generally meant, according to my translation of it, that I was to construct a persona the reader would recognize by inventing a distinctive element in my prose that would identify me as that writer and that writer alone, as if I were designing and sewing an identifiable vestment.

For a writer who constructs his or her style in such a way, however, that’s how it feels: constructed. The novelist Elmore Leonard once said in an interview, “I try not to use constructions that are obviously written constructions.” After a year or more of attempting to formulate a style, I realized the admonition to do so was as helpful as saying, “Develop an extra frontal lobe.” So I started to write and write, without focusing on creating a voice, and when I had what I felt was a story, I gave it to my favorite reader, soon to be my spouse, to read. Her name is Carole—her mother likely a fan of the movie star Lombard.

Once I started to publish, I read each story to her. She knew three foreign languages my English resonated against, was a graduate of a private school, better at social situations than I. That, along with the beaches and rains of the Pacific Northwest that constituted her homebound makeup, added the breadth of the sea to my inland map. Without her saying much, I learned from her the most about my potentialities and limits. My reading to her reminded me of the recordings I heard in the language lab, and a critical resonance in her responded like radar, alerting me to false notes that jangled my senses. “I hate to botch anything,” Saul Bellow once said about his fiction. “I hate to get things badly wrong … seriously wrong.” There is a wrong.

I cut every falsity I recognized and used other words and phrases, usually simpler. I found that fewer false notes occurred when my defenses fell and I spoke directly to her. After months of this, I felt a resonance in my head when the words I wrote rose in conformation to an inner sense established by reading to her. She was free to return to real life.

How did this moment of internalized resonance occur? I’m not sure, but I suspect persistence. I think I came to the same realization that an authority on language, Charles Harrington Elster, points out in What in the Word?  : “The colloquial has become our modern paragon of style and, to all but the most confident stylists, formality has become something of a sin.”

Sin, he says. Colloquial of course means words in the manner and tone and verbal arrangements as spoken. That is what voice is— not a vestment.

Members of the workshops I conduct read their writing aloud. What I was striving for when I began, I want beginning writers to become attuned to: the distinctive sound of their inner diction. When they read to a quorum of peers, those who will be writers hear—when words they felt were okay test the air—false notes that cause them to flinch or blush.

In 1985, two decades after my first publication, Carole sat in on a poetry workshop, a three-hour evening session. My talk that night, in a common preface to an early workshop, was about voice. She took notes, and I refer to them because I can’t speak with the authority I had at that age, the mid-40s, when most people are tempted, as I was, to assume they know it all. Age corrects that.

Voice: she wrote, and drew a dark square around the word. — imprint of your personality on all you do or say. I didn’t begin with literary terms, because I had learned that voice is an inner essential, inborn as I register it. — appears helplessly on the page. I’m not sure how I explained or expanded on this, but I can say my imprint appears helplessly only when I refrain from trying to impose strictures or constructions and allow it to open in a natural way, helplessly, as it were—one can’t help what one is, one can only improve on it—onto a page. — is what and the way you are when most yourself. I was troubled at times by encouragers who said about a future moment I feared, an interview or public performance, “Just be yourself.” I wasn’t sure who that was. I was more myself when a sheet of paper lay under my hand and I was searching for words to secure a scene in a novel. The scenes appear movielike in my mind and I try to translate the visual acts of any appearance into language. — physically a part of me; and below that she wrote innards . I suspect I was saying that my voice, your voice, is as much a part of me, of you, as our innards, indisputably so, no substitute, none other will do. — exactly the way you talk. Yes, in the best sense, when all hesitations and backtrackings, as in, you know, like, you know, like awesome!—when all the backtracking searches for words are removed and a central inner vocal throb remains. It’s also the way you walk and dress and enter a room and speak to an amour because it’s the one-and-only you and not a style. —every voice leaves an imprint as different as a fingerprint. I would rather I had said distinctive as a fingerprint, but this was off the cuff—as a sort of unassailable proof. No research on voice recognition was available at the time, or anyway made public, and now we know the extent of it: your spoken voice leaves an imprint as unique as a fingerprint.

A previously unpublished talk in obviously spoken prose by Saul Bellow, perhaps America’s most deserving Nobel Laureate, appeared after his death in The New York Review of Books:

[I]n my first consciousness, I was, among other things, a Jew, the child of Jewish immigrants. At home our parents spoke Russian to each other, we children spoke Yiddish with them, and we spoke English with one another. At the age of four we began to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, we observed Jewish customs, some of them superstitions, and we recited prayers and blessings all day long. Because I had to memorize most of Genesis, my first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew … A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

That is why Bellow’s voice has dimensional resonance—the rough but distinct edges of his “archaic” upbringing underlie the sophisticated polish of his paragraphs. To refuse to un-faith oneself is to refuse to undo a certainty that runs like a current under all writing, whatever one’s faith may be, since writing exists in the faith that the words employed will make sense. All these are grounded within the individual voice. With a refusal as grand as Bellow’s, a writer may begin to produce, or start the course of producing, books of the kind that Bellow wrote, from Seize the Day and Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet down to The Dean’s December and Humboldt’s Gift to More Die of Heartbreak and Ravelstein .

In all these, Bellow, in his quirky voice, is prophetic in predicting the spectrum of dislocations in present-day America, whether educational or racial or political or gender related, not to mention the assault of word wars on the Internet. The reason lies in his words themselves: that he refused to give up his faith, to un-Jew himself, such that the prophetic truths in his fiction are based on a moral choice that deepens his discernment. Those who retain the essence of faith, and try to shape their words toward that evasive element called truth, are aided by discernment in their depictions, as you find in fictionists from Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka and Albert Camus to Willa Cather and Louise Erdrich and Marilynne Robinson. At the center of any credible truth is an individual voice as identifiable as a fingerprint.

This doesn’t mean that, as a writer of faith or as one with an essence of faith, you gain the applause of an attendant crowd. Openness of voice may not enhance a novel’s reception. The clearer my voice became, the more my work met resistance. Most writers are outcasts or anyway outliers who exercise their imagination in seclusion, but the response to my work at a certain point seemed so severe that I put in a book for however long it might last, “prejudice, whatever form it takes, is a boot in the face.” That doesn’t mean a writer should necessarily write about faith, but he or she should understand that the underlying faith that informs prose has the power to offend.

The novelist-philosopher John Gardner once told me that the personality amalgam common to writers is the monster-angel. The fleet angel-being who lays down lines of glowing and impeccable prose might be on the run from an underlying monster of a writer’s true natural state. That’s at least partly what Bellow meant, I believe, when he said that you as writer will out yourself the more you pretend to be the person you are not. He noted that a writer is most autobiographical when writing about a character the writer assumes is nothing like himself at all. When a guarded self is set aside, the floodgates open, while, on the obverse, writer’s block occurs when the self feels that the monster wants to emerge. Anthony Burgess, writing about his biography of D. H. Lawrence, said, “Every book you write is fundamentally about you.”

The beauty of writing as it wanders in its offhand way across a page, or rises in arrested spiky arrangements, is its ability to set up correspondences with other perspectives, backgrounds, abilities, tastes, in a kind of spiritual kinship. The author, after all, is absent, but the vagaries of vulnerability in his or her voice allow the auditor to enter pathways that lead to a writer’s central vocal identity— you hear that? And the reader, invisible to the author, is drawn inside the work, say, of Bellow, an articulate and dissident Jew of another generation, another culture, or rests in the humane architecture assembled by the African-American novelist and philosopher Charles Johnson, the author of Middle Passage . Such voices crisscross and complement each other along with a host of murmuring others in the echoing shadowgraph of the brain—all extending themselves endlessly across a shifting handiwork of remembered pages, the instillation of each writer an expression of faith in its eventual encounter with a reader who listens.

Larry Woiwode is the Poet Laureate of North Dakota, and the author of five novels and two books of stories.

● NEWSLETTER

My Journey to Finding My Voice

By Don, a Writing Coach

I remember reading my professor’s comments on a paper I’d written in one of my first graduate seminars at Carolina. The paper excited me because it was a topic that interested me, and I believed that my excitement would also factor into producing a well-written, deeply riveting original argument. I was wrong. When I read my professor’s comments, which were few, the words that stood out most were on the last page. Scribbled around some other notes that mentioned the promise of my idea, the professor had written, “This is almost unintelligible .” Reading this comment took a heavy toll on me even though I thought I could shake off the unhelpful criticism.

The semester those words stabbed at my confidence was also the first year of my coaching and teaching writing at UNC. My mind ran aimlessly with the possibilities of what this failure could bring. Was I not capable of successfully completing graduate school? What would the Writing Center think of me as a coach if they knew that a professor called my writing unintelligible ? What would my students think if they knew their writing teacher had just been scolded as intellectually deficient? How could I ever consider a career in teaching from that moment forward?

As time went on, I felt as though I was on auto drive. I smiled and laughed with my peers and colleagues. I continued to teach, faking my enthusiasm because deep inside burning questions about my identity as a writer tugged at me. I wore a mask shielding my friends and family from my overwhelming thoughts of inadequacies. To them, I was soaring. But it felt as though I was falling deeper and deeper into a pit in which my mask would give way and my voice would fade into the background as the faint whisper of a once-promising educator.

Towards the end of my first year at the Writing Center, our former Assistant Director introduced me to Vershawn Young’s essay that questioned the framework of how we teach and learn writing: “ Should Writers Use They Own English? ” Young, an interdisciplinary scholar in African American studies, wrote this provocative essay in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and its words sang to me from within the pages. For Young, the central concern is the negative effects from people in power not acknowledging other forms of writing and communication in English. I realized that the problem was this professor’s lack of awareness that many English speakers’ use of this language is inflected with their histories, backgrounds, and lived experiences. While my writing is far from perfect, it is comprehensible. I know that now. It wasn’t that my writing was unintelligibly written; rather, it was my professor’s refusal to understand that they didn’t own the English language.

I write this blog, recalling this pivotal, chaotic time in my life, because it was this moment that prompted a turning point in my career. As a writing coach and teacher, I have come to understand the position of power that I hold over students’ potential learning outcomes. Because of my time at the Writing Center, both as a coach and a coachee, I know that my feedback matters. It matters even more when the students I help every day can use this feedback to build more skills and to learn more about themselves as learners and writers. I hope to never make a student feel the way that I felt that semester.

I love the English language, and I often think of myself as a special curator, whose life mission is to record and uphold the lasting rhetorical legacy of my people. The way that we use this language, while practical, forceful, and rhythmic, is vital to our collective mapping of American English, which, in and of itself, is diverse, colorful, and teeming with new usages and words every day.

Useful feedback is leaving room for students to effectively communicate without losing their sense of identity. Even though this journey has been less than ideal, I am confident in my abilities as a learner and educator. I know that what I bring to the table, what you bring to the table, what others bring to table are all necessary components to our larger understanding of the world around us. Through the journey to find my voice, I hope that I am able to amplify the voice of others along the way.

This blog showcases the perspectives of UNC Chapel Hill community members learning and writing online. If you want to talk to a Writing and Learning Center coach about implementing strategies described in the blog, make an appointment with a writing coach , a peer tutor , or an academic coach today. Have an idea for a blog post about how you are learning and writing remotely? Contact us here .

Finding my Voice: My Journey as a Writer

September 6, 2024, nicole tacconi.

I never viewed myself as a writer. In fact, I remember I was quite opposed to the idea growing up. At the age of 6, I gave myself a headstart by struggling to read. In elementary school, the pattern continued as English was consistently my worst subject. Grammar and spelling never quite clicked in my brain—the latter of the two still has not improved with time (thank god for spell check). Thus, in middle school, I finally waved the white flag. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m good at many things, and I acknowledge that writing will never be on that list.” I never once thought I was good at writing, or had any interest in writing for myself.

I believe part of this misconception about writing came with its elusive nature. Growing up, it frustrated me that there was never a formula to follow. Unlike the math problems I could easily solve, writing left me uneasy on how to approach it, and even worse, how do you know when a piece is done? How do you know if it's good?

I didn’t like these aspects of writing for a long time. The only writing I did throughout my life was in a journal. I’m not sure what drew me to it, but initially I journaled to process things around me and to remember my life. Either way, I’ve been doing it consistently for the past seven years.

When I got to Princeton, my conception of writing didn’t change immediately. I took the infamous freshman writing seminar and felt further convinced that writing was not for me—academic writing at least. Slowly though, my journal evolved. Here and there I would write an entry that sounded pretty enough to share out loud with my sister. Looking back, I think my journaling slowly morphed into a sort of expressive art form. I was journaling to process my emotions, but also to portray my life in a poetic way. 

Even as I grew to love journaling, I did not formalize my love for writing until I found myself here, blogging for Princeton’s Admission Office. This job has helped me formalize my journal-like rants into completed pieces that I can share. And through these blogs, I realized a new inkling for that elusive yet expressive process we call creative writing. 

All of this is to say that being fluent in an art form doesn’t come naturally for everyone. For me, I believe years of journaling evolved a weakness of mine into a strength. It has been an unexpected turn of events to say the least. I don’t know if I’ve earned myself the title of a writer, but I can admit that I now view myself as one. 

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Finding My Voice

I looked up and flinched slightly. There were at least sixty of them, far more than expected. I had thirty weeks to teach them the basics of public speaking. Gritting my teeth, I split my small group of tutors among the crowd and sat down for an impromptu workshop with the eighth graders. They were inexperienced, monotone, and quiet. In other words, they reminded me of myself…

I was born with a speech impediment that weakened my mouth muscles. My speech was garbled and incomprehensible. Understandably, I grew up quiet. I tried my best to blend in and give the impression I was silent by choice. I joined no clubs in primary school, instead preferring isolation. It took six years of tongue twisters and complicated mouth contortions in special education classes for me to produce the forty-four sounds of the English language.

Then, high school came. I was sick of how confining my quiet nature had become. For better or for worse, I decided to finally make my voice heard.

Scanning the school club packet, I searched for my place. Most activities just didn’t feel right. But then, I sat in on a debate team practice and was instantly hooked. I was captivated by how confidently the debaters spoke and how easily they commanded attention. I knew that this was the path forward.

Of course, this was all easier said than done. Whenever it was my turn to debate, I found that I was more of a deer in the headlights than a person enjoying the spotlight. My start was difficult, and I stuttered more than I spoke in those first few weeks. Nonetheless, I began using the same tools as I did when I learned to speak all those years ago: practice and time. I watched the upperclassmen carefully, trying to speak as powerfully as they did. I learned from my opponents and adapted my style through the hundreds of rounds I lost. With discipline, I drilled, repeating a single speech dozens of times until I got it right.

Day by day, I began to stand a little taller and talk a little louder both inside and outside of debate. In a few months, my blood no longer froze when I was called on in class. I found I could finally look other people in the eyes when I talked to them without feeling embarrassed. My posture straightened and I stopped fidgeting around strangers. I began to voice my opinions as opposed to keeping my ideas to myself. As my debate rank increased from the triple to single-digits, so too did my standing at school. I began interacting with my teachers more and leading my peers in clubs. In discussions, I put forward my ideas with every bit as much conviction as my classmates. When seniors began to ask me for advice and teachers recruited me to teach underclassmen, I discovered not only that I had been heard, but that others wanted to listen. At heart, I am still reserved (some things never change), but in finding my voice, I found a strength I could only dream of when I stood in silence so many years ago.

Standing in front of the crowd of students, it was my hope that by founding this program, I could give them an experience that was as empowering as mine had been for me. As the weeks passed, the students inched past their insecurities and towards finding their voices, just as I had always wanted to do. On the last day of class for that year, I looked up and saw each of the students standing confidently, equipped and ready to speak their minds in whatever they wanted to do. They had come a long way from being the shy and stuttering novices that they were just thirty weeks before—I can’t wait to see how far they can go from here.

Admissions Committee Comments

Jerry’s essay helped the admissions committee understand his background and how he persevered and grew through debate. Although we had already learned about Jerry’s enthusiasm for debate in other parts of his application, this essay gave so much more depth into why this activity is meaningful for him. Given what he shared in his essay, we can imagine Jerry being an active participant both in and out of the classroom.

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Finding My Voice Essay

Petruso is a freelance writer who has degrees in history and screenwriting. In this essay, Petruso argues that most of the white characters in Finding My Voice are profoundly undeveloped and presented with an element of reverse racism .

Marie G. Lee's Finding My Voice resonates with readers who have been hurt by racism, but it is less likely to spark any recognition or enlightenment among readers who may have inflicted those injuries. In Melinda L. de Jesús's article "Mixed Blessings: Korean American Identity and Interracial Interactions in the Young Adult Novels of Marie G. Lee," she analyzes four of Lee's young adult books, including Finding My Voice . De Jesús praises Lee's depiction of Korean Americans and their identity through the filter of teen drama. However, de Jesús also notes a flaw in Lee's books, claiming "While her Asian American readers will most likely find...

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