“Voice- ifying ” Techniques

1. “Voice-ifying” Techniques How to add individual flavor and flair to your writing

2. Direct-contact sentences: Example 1 “So I walked down the street to ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar. Now this neighbor was a pig. And he wasn’t too bright, either. He had built his whole house out of straw. Can you believe it? I mean who in his right mind would build a house of straw?” -Jon Scieszka’sThe True Story of the Three Little Pigs

3. Commentary dashes: Example 1 “Spring 1944. Good news from the Russian front. No doubt could remain now of Germany’s defeat. It was only a question of time – of months or weeks perhaps.” - Elie Wiesel’s Night (page 6)

4. Commentary dashes; Example 2 “The harder words got for the little girl, the more and more time she spent drawing – how she loved to draw! – or just sitting and dreaming.” - Patricia Polacco’sThank You, Mr. Falker

5. Whispering parentheses: Example 1 “I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly vaporized (‘tweren’t nothing left of him but a scorch mark’) by body-sized bolts of lightening when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines…” - Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods

6. Runaway sentences: Example 1 “All the strategies and agencies and institutions needed to contain, control, and normalize a social plague—some of them severe, other exploitative, and some benign—are, it seems, being assembled: defensible stores, defensible parks, defensible entrances to housing projects, defensible schools where weapons-detectors are installed at the front of the schools, ‘safety corridors’ between schools and nearby subway stations, ‘grieving rooms’ in some of the schools where students have a place to mourn the friends who do not make it safely through the ‘safety corridors,’ a large and crowded criminal court and the enormous new court complex now under construction, an old reform school (Spofford) and the new, much larger juvenile prison being built on St. Anne’s Avenue, an adult prison, a prison barge, a projected kitchen to prepackage meals, a projected high school to train kids to work in prisons and in other crime-related areas, the two symmetrical prostitute strolls, one to the east, one to the west, and counseling and condom distribution to protect the prostitutes from spreading or contracting AIDS, services for grown-ups, who already have contracted AIDS, services for children who have AIDS, services for children who have seen their mothers die of AIDS, services for men and women who are still in prison, a welfare office for determining who is eligible for checks and check-cashing stores where residents can cash the checks, food stamp distribution and bodegas that accept the stamps at discount to enable mothers to buy cigarettes or diapers, 13 shelters, 12 soup kitchens, 11 free food pantries, perhaps someday an ‘empowerment zone,’ or ‘enterprise zone,’ or some other kind of business zone to generate some jobs for a small fraction of the people who reside here: all the pieces of the perfectible ghetto, the modernized and sometimes even well-served urban lazaretto, with civic-minded CEOs who come up from Manhattan maybe once a week to serve as mentors or ‘role models’ to the children in the schools while some of their spouses organize benefit balls to pay for dinners in the shelters” (Kozal 135-36).

7. What “voicy” technique is this? “Anguish. German soldiers – with their steel helmets and their emblem, the death’s head.” - Elie Wiesel’s Night (page 7)

8. What “voicy” technique is this? Once upon a time, in a land not so far away (actually it’s so close it’s practically in your backyard and you might not even know it’s there) there lived a little green frog girl, her mother, and her father (who is secretly a Toad working for the TIA [toad intelligence agency] that is secretly undercover as a frog, but that’s a story for…dang! I messed that part up! Ok, let’s try this again…