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RE: Retaining author's voice, was How to Use English PunctuationCorrectly - wikiHow
Subject:RE: Retaining author's voice, was How to Use English PunctuationCorrectly - wikiHow From:"Lauren" <lt34 -at- csus -dot- edu> To:"'Janice Gelb'" <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>, "'TECHWR-L'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:25:25 -0700
> Editors need to make sure that all documentation from a
> company sounds the same, appropriate to the audience level.
> OTOH, that doesn't mean that the documentation has to sound
> like it was written by a robot, or all written by the editor!
> I think we should strive to keep some of the writer's style
> in documentation without compromising consistency, appropriateness,
> or common corporate "feel."
>
> -- Janice
More on voice. Maybe too much, but I think the discussion is interesting.
I like reading what people have to say about voice.
I was taught, or have at least learned through the years, that documents
from multiple authors should be edited to sound like they came from one
author. It becomes confusing to the reader of multiple documents when the
voice between the documents changes. Readers adjust to a particular writing
style, tone, and nuances that make up the voice and they make adjustments in
their reading style to accommodate the voice. Having to make these
adjustments with each new document can become tedious. So documents should
be edited for a "neutral" voice. This does not mean that document should be
dry and voiceless or sound mechanical, but that the document or document set
should sound like it came from one person and the person's personality
(reflected in voice) should not over-shadow the document, so neutral.
An example of a collection of documents that have multiple authors and one
voice include text books that have many authors. When reading a Physical
Science book that includes a chapter about planets and another chapter about
elements, the reader should not feel inclined to shift gears in order to
understand the writing style of the authors of different chapters, the
change in subject-matter provides enough stress. Eliminating all voice and
reducing the content to just facts defeats the purpose of an educational
document because people learn better when the document reads as though it is
coming from a person and not machine, so some voice must be present.
The best example that I can use to describe adjustment between voices is the
adjustments that we make make between college text books and peer-reviewed
journal articles while researching a particular subject. Now, although
there are different authors in the works that are studied, there is still a
difference between the voice of a text book and that of a journal article.
So I am trying to discuss voice from this context. This is really an
incomplete analogy, but, unless we have a list of authors to compare (well
we have forum members, but the posts are not exactly polished documents),
this is the best that I can come up with.
A text book is written with detail and sometimes repetition. When a reader
adjusts to the voice of the text book, he can, often, readily find the
information that he needs and merely skim the document. When he then reads
a journal article, he must change gears, essentially, and slow down his
reading to understand the detail of the document because of the complexity
of the work. There are more differences between text books and journal
articles than just voice, but the adjustments made by the reader between the
two document styles are consistent with adjustments made by the reader
between voices.
So voice is necessary in documentation that communicates some subject, but
voice should be consistent and neutral across a document set that may have
different authors. Documents that do not really require much in the way of
voice include specification sheets and, frequently, system administration
documents that are generally a series of command lines with very little
conversational content. Although, those documents fall under technical
writing.
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