Authorial Elements
Author's Voice and Writing Style
Your voice as a writer is the combination of personality, perspective, and attitude that comes through on the page. It's what makes your writing sound like you and not like anyone else. Developing that voice is one of the main goals of revision.
Style is the set of technical choices that produce your voice. These include word choice, sentence structure, figurative language, and rhythm. Voice is the effect; style is the craft behind it.
Two components of style worth revising carefully:
- Tone is the attitude your writing conveys toward its subject and audience. A comedy might carry a lighthearted tone, while a grief narrative might feel somber or restrained. During revision, check whether your tone stays consistent with your intent, or whether it accidentally shifts in places.
- Diction is your specific word choice. Formal diction ("the individual proceeded") creates a different feel than informal diction ("the guy walked over"). Neither is better on its own. The question during revision is whether your diction fits the world of your piece. Scientific jargon works in a research paper; colloquial slang works in a teenager's diary entry. Problems arise when diction drifts without purpose.
Narrative Distance and Point of View
Narrative distance is how close or far the narrator feels from the characters and events. Think of it like a camera: sometimes it's right inside a character's head, and sometimes it's hovering above the scene.
Point of view is the grammatical perspective of the narration:
- First person ("I walked into the room and saw the killer standing over the body") creates close narrative distance. The reader is locked into one character's thoughts and perceptions.
- Second person ("You walk into the room") is rarer and puts the reader directly into the action.
- Third person ("She entered the room and discovered the gruesome scene") can range from very close to very distant, depending on how much access the narrator gives to a character's inner life.
During revision, watch for unintentional shifts in narrative distance. If you're writing tight third person and suddenly drop in a detail the character couldn't know, that's a distance slip worth catching.
Sentence Structure and Flow
Sentence Variety and Rhythm
Reading your draft aloud is one of the best revision tools for catching monotonous sentence patterns. If every sentence has the same length and structure, the writing will feel flat no matter how good the content is.
The four basic sentence types give you a range to work with:
- Simple: one independent clause. "She laughed."
- Compound: two or more independent clauses joined by a conjunction. "She laughed, and he smiled."
- Complex: one independent clause plus one or more dependent clauses. "When she laughed, he smiled."
- Compound-complex: a combination of the two. "She laughed, and when he smiled, she knew everything would be okay."
Mixing these creates rhythm, the pattern of emphasis and pause that gives prose its musicality. Parallel structure (repeating a grammatical pattern) is one tool for building rhythm in prose. During revision, look for stretches where you've accidentally written five sentences of the same length and type, then vary them.
Pacing and Tension
Pacing is the speed at which your story feels like it's moving. You control it primarily through sentence length, level of detail, and scene structure.
- Short, choppy sentences speed things up and create urgency. They work well in action scenes or moments of high tension.
- Longer, more complex sentences slow the reader down, which suits reflective passages or moments of calm.
The key revision move is varying pacing on purpose. If a climactic scene reads too slowly, cut some of the longer descriptive sentences. If a quiet emotional moment feels rushed, expand the sentences and add sensory detail. Pacing problems are common in first drafts because you're focused on getting the story down, not on controlling the reader's experience of time.
Character and Dialogue
Dialogue Tags and Attribution
Dialogue tags attribute speech to a character: "he said," "she asked." They're functional, and in most cases, simple tags like "said" and "asked" are your best options because readers glide right past them.
A few revision guidelines for dialogue tags:
- Varied tags like "whispered," "shouted," or "mumbled" can convey tone, but use them sparingly. If every line has a different dramatic tag, it starts to feel overwrought.
- Action beats can replace tags entirely and do double duty by showing character. Instead of "I never want to see you again," she said angrily, try: She slammed the door. "I never want to see you again." The action conveys the emotion without telling the reader how to feel.
- Over-the-top tags ("he ejaculated," "she sighed breathlessly") tend to pull readers out of the scene. In revision, flag any tag that draws more attention to itself than to the dialogue.
Character Voice and Consistency
Each character should sound distinct on the page. Character voice comes from their background, personality, education, and emotional state. A retired professor and a twelve-year-old skateboarder shouldn't use the same vocabulary or sentence patterns.
During revision, try this: cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell which character is speaking just from how they talk. If you can't, the voices need more differentiation.
Consistency matters just as much as distinctiveness. If a character speaks in clipped, guarded sentences for the first half of your story and then suddenly becomes eloquent and open with no narrative reason, readers will notice. That doesn't mean characters can't change, but shifts in voice should be motivated by events in the story, not by the writer forgetting how the character sounds.