Finding your inner dentist

by Angela Smith

In an earlier post, Nicola talked about keeping individual author voices alive in the face of producing a consistent set of courses. Time for me to stick my oar in the gap she left – how to make sure the voice is still there when the content needs invasive editing or rewriting.

I’m not a top flight middle-aged male implant dentist; I’m not a fifty-something northern businessman; I’m not even an Australian financial advice business guru, yet I’ve had to manipulate and fill gaps in content from all of these authors without the text losing its essential character.

There are umpteen technical bits and bobs that make up a writer’s voice: word choice, sentence structure, point of view – the list goes on. Questions such as “Would the author use this word?” and “Would the author structure a sentence like this?” provide valuable editing checks if something “sounds wrong” post-editing or post-writing. However, try to hold all this in mind while you are actually writing and your head might just fall off. I’m sure it’s possible to learn to write like someone via careful analysis of their techniques, but who has the time? What I need is to get a feel for a voice and to do this quickly I have to learn by impersonation.

A person’s natural writing voice often falls very close to their speaking voice and I am usually lucky enough to have met and spoken with the author of the content I’m working on. This helps immeasurably when trying to step into an author’s size nines. Once I’ve met the author, I can “act the part”. I visualise the person’s appearance, mannerisms, accent and try to think my way into their attitudes, then either act out the part of “them” in my head, or observe this imagined “them” explain the point to me in their words. No doubt my colleagues sometimes wonder why I’m making faces, or sitting in an uncharacteristically butch way, but it works for me. And the more I edit in an author’s voice, the easier I find it to slip into character.

Any authors reading this are starting to feel a little creeped out by now, so perhaps I should stop. But before I do, it’s worth asking one last question - how do I know if I’ve been successful in maintaining the character of an author? In my experience, it’s normally when the author comments of the finished course that “you haven’t changed the content much” or quotes one of my sentences as if they remember writing it themselves!