The Sound on the Page

Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page translated his study of writers and writing to the page as inspiration. He examined what writers say about the process of writing and how the words sound on the page, saying “Just as reading is like listening, the act of writing is, or should be, linked to speaking.” On ever-elusive style, he concludes, “Like a face, a style is partly meaningless as a gauge of character, but partly very meaningful indeed. And although it may seem that one’s style is more malleable than one’s face—in writing, all you have to do is delete a word or replace it with another, as opposed to the fuss and bother of plastic surgery—it is in fact unexpectedly hard to alter.” Undeniably, we write in a style that's uniquely our own even as it's difficult to pin down. He proposes that style is made up of competence, iconoclasm, extroversion, feeling, single-mindedness, tension, and solicitousness. Then, he discusses style in the various forms of writing from persuasive writing to poetry. In the end, he gives up and says style cannot be taught but steps can be taken to develop it. He suggests that writers engage in active reading, imitation, copying, reverse imitation, active reading of own work, read aloud, rewrite, and listen to criticism. After acknowledging that “This work, the cleaning of brush to create a walkable path, is never-ending for a writer” Yagoda ends his book with: “Anyone who puts pen to paper can have a prose style. In almost every case, that style will be quiet, sometimes so quiet as to be detectable only by you, the writer. In the quiet, you can listen to your sound in various manifestations, then you can start to shape it and develop it. That project can last as long as you keep writing, and it never grows old.” That's encouraging.