Your Writing Voice

So, where does your “voice” fall into all of this? There is a misconception that when you write something, the mere fact “you” wrote it (as in, your fingers typed the keys) means it is in your voice—and that is not true.

Commodity Content has a universal Commodity Voice.

“I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and got to work.”

It should be obvious this sentence cannot be attributed to any individual person. That’s because there is nothing identifiable about it—neither from its content (what it’s saying) or its “style” (how it’s being said). And yet, the vast majority of people would like to believe that when they write these 13 words (as in, their fingers click-clack on their keys), not only are the words “theirs,” but they are in “their voice.”

But ask the average person to articulate what makes their voice “their voice,” and what you will often receive back is a word salad of bundled, non-specific terms and phrases:

• “It sounds like me.”
• “It’s to the point.”
• “It’s clean. I like it.”
• “That’s how I would say it.”
• “Because I wrote it!”

But none of these are correct.

“Voice” is a term we use to represent 3 smaller variables that show up in our writing and speech:

1. Vocabulary: Your voice changes depending on whether you say, “cool” vs “exquisite” vs “dope.” That’s because vocabulary is a reflection of your identity, and sends all kinds of signals to readers and listeners about who you are and how you see the world. For example: choosing academic words over conversational words, or saying “Chi-Town” instead of “Chicago” in a sentence. These vocabulary choices often have little impact on the sentence’s meaning, but do change your perception of the writer or speaker’s identity—adding unspoken layers of communication.
2. Rhythm: Your voice also changes depending on the cadence of your speech patterns. William Faulkner notoriously wrote in long, verbose sentences, whereas Ernest Hemingway more favorably wrote in short, terse sentences. Rhythm is the combination of sentence length, punctuation placement, and vocabulary—the three together creating what is known as “tone.”
3. EDAN: Explanation, Description, Action, Narration. What is the purpose of your writing? Better yet, what is the purpose of each individual sentence? Your voice is not a static decision. Your voice can change sentence by sentence. Are you someone who likes to Explain (tell)? Do you prefer to Describe (show)? Do you speak in Action? Or do you hypothesize in Narration? Voice is the combination of what you say (content) and how you say it (style).

As a result, you do not “find” your voice (as many people would like to believe, forever on a quest of linguistic enlightenment).

You create your voice—the same way a painter creates new colors through different combinations of Red, Green, and Blue.

It’s not that it’s wrong, and it’s not that it’s “AI Slop.”

It’s simply Commodity Content written without any Personality Content, resulting in a Commodity Voice.

The same way you cannot expect AI to write non-Commodity Content without a library of Personality Content to pull from (your Personal Language Model), you cannot expect AI to write in a non-Commodity Voice when you haven't written in a non-Commodity Voice yourself (and then stored that writing inside your Digital Brain). That’s not to say you must learn to joust a pen like Jane Austen, but you should at least have some baseline awareness around the qualities of your distinctive voice should you ever hope to recreate it—either yourself, manually, or with the help of a robot, automatically.

That said, I have been teaching writing for over a decade. I have helped tens of thousands of people start writing online. And I find this fixation of voice in the writing world to be utterly unproductive. Just because “you” wrote it does not mean it has a voice. And just because a sentence has a Commodity Voice does not mean it’s bad—or worse, is “AI Slop.”

Commodity Ideas and Commodity Sentences are somewhat unavoidable across every industry and topic. There are only so many ways you can say the same Commodity Thing—just like, no matter how creative you get with dynamics and ornamentation, there are only so many ways to play a scale on the piano or film a scene of a movie. Voice is a minority element, and a much harder variable for differentiation.

The everyday person would be much better off acquiring unique life experiences (non-Commodity Content), and then writing about those unique life experiences (Personality Content).