For the last few weeks, I've been talking a lot about voice and how you can adapt your writing to mirror that of your client.
But first, a quick refresher:
As we know, your voice is made up of your:
Vocabulary
Tone
Cadence
Last week I talked about Vocabulary and used the words of the iconic Fleetwood Mac to make my point (here it is if you missed it).
Now it's all about the tone of your writing and, you guessed it, it's back to Spotify!
Changing the tone in music is relatively straightforward.
You can change the key or the instrumentation, and the song changes completely and tells a whole different story.
Take Joni Mitchell, for example.
Her first outing of Both Sides Now in 1969 was light, floaty, and whimsical.
She captured the imagination of a child looking at cloud formations while a simple guitar strums away in the background
If you don't know it, take a moment and have a listen.
The song went on to be a standard and covered by many different artists (in fact, despite composing the track, Joni wasn't the first to record it).
But the song returned 33 years later in 2000, as a sultry, brooding, and dark reimagination, Joni is older, wiser, and has a full orchestra behind her.
It's a voice of experience.
It's almost unrecognisable and exploded into popular culture in 2003 as the soundtrack to Emma Thompson's heart actually breaking in Love Actually.
Gets me every time…
Getting the your tone across in your writing isn't as easy to do as dropping the key of your music, though.
How many emails or texts have you sent that are misinterpreted by the reader due to your sarcastic tone, or a joke which didn't land?
The tone of your writing is again, controlled by the words you choose.
Scroll back up and take a look at how I referred to the two different versions of the same song.
Go on, have a read...I'll give you a few minutes....
Did you see it?
Whimsical vs sultry
Light vs dark
Floaty vs brooding
Just by switching out a few adjectives, I've changed the tone of my writing completely and projected my opinions of the songs onto you.
And this is just a brief description of a 4 minute song.
In a longer piece of writing, you can vary your tone multiple times and take your reader on the emotional journey of your choosing.
Powerful stuff, these words!
So your vocabulary affects your tone, but your tone can be reinforced by your punctuation, your sentence and paragraph length, and the rhythm of your writing.
And that, my friend, is your cadence.
And I'll talk more about that next week!