Be Yourself
One piece of advice from Zinsser that I like is the following: “Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore, a fundamental rule is: be yourself “(Zinsser, 20). As a reader, I feel the same way. I want the writer to sound like himself. I don’t want him to pretend to be someone he is not just to please me. I am open-minded and ready to hear what he has to say…not what he thinks I want him to say. (I think that Zinsser actually embodies this perfectly; he writes for himself and doesn’t concede to what he thinks the reader wants to hear. For example, he often admits that writing is hard for him and that he is constantly writing and re-writing. It may be hard, especially as a writer, to admit this, yet he stays true to himself and comes across as more genuine.) As a writer, I’ll admit that “being yourself” can be hard. Often, writers feel insecure and self-conscious. They may doubt their opinions or their style. This feeling of doubt often causes them to lose themselves in the work. They become unrecognizable, buried under the verbiage they use as a crutch. I want to try to avoid this in my writing. I want to try to let my voice shine through the words, instead of allowing it to drown in them.
3 responses so far
I like this piece of advice a lot because I feel like in high school, many of us wrote to our teachers on a specific topic or book and failed to completely individualize our own voices when we wrote. However, now that we are all in college, I think many of us can begin to shed our old fears of insecurity and find our own distinct voices in our writing even if we talk about new or unfamiliar topics.
For me, I find it especially hard to follow this advice because I guess im not sure what my voice should sound like yet. Whenever i read, I find myself thinking “wow, thats a really great metaphor, i should use it sometime” or, “I wish my writing sounded like that!”
What I’m trying to say is that “being yourself” is a lot easier said than done. Because to make your voice heard in your writing, you have to be very clear in what your voice is.
And mine is still developing.
I also feel that it’s really important to let your personality show through your writing. Just as each person has a different way of speaking, each person’s way of writing is unique as well. I think it’s a great compliment to hear someone recognize when you wrote something. It’s like a acknowledgement that “Hey, you’re distinctive!”