Author: Ben Yagoda, Writing for
Ben Yagoda, Writing for
Ben Yagoda is the author of How to Not Write Bad, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and many other books. You can find out more about him at benyagoda.com and on Twitter.
Some years ago I wrote a book called “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.” In it I tried to get at some of the elements — other than content — that make strong writers’ prose distinctive and immediately identifiable: their stylistic fingerprint. To illustrate the general concept, I used the example of contractions. Consider two sentences: “I do not like green eggs and ham.” And “I don’t like green eggs and ham.” The meaning (obviously) is identical. But the sound, the voice, is quite different. Most of us aren’t a Hemingway, or a Samuel Beckett, or a Dr.…