I’ve been working my way through an educational textbook on voice by Dona J. Hickey, now long out-of-print published back in 1993 by Mayfield Publishing Company. I found it used from someplace and am going through the book again for the second time. It’s fascinating stuff.
It focuses mostly on speech melodies, rhetorical usage, low to middle to high range of voice, and makes you practice a lot. It’s the sort of book I imagine the communications team, aka Toby and Sam, on The West Wing aced the first time around.
Training your inner ear to hear what you’re reading is a skill. I can do this when I’m reading other people’s work, for the most part. But my inner ear plays a dual role sometimes. As a copyeditor or proofreader for educational material, my inner ear is looking for error. Sometimes, when trying to read a book, I simply can’t keep going. I’m mentally correcting errors that aren’t mine to fix. I’ve unlearned much of this after yelping loudly from the passenger seat when passing billboards and road signs with the most egregious errors. Let’s just say whoever is driving is not amused by my outbursts.
So training my inner ear on my own writing is taking a bit of time. Thanks to a fellow writer’s advice, I’ve started asking my devices to read my own writing to me or I record myself reading. This seems to activate another part of my brain that helps me “hear” better. I mean, when I’m proofreading and need clarity on how a sentence sounds, I often read it out loud to make sure it works.
How do you work on your writing voice? How do you train your inner ear?
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