Voice Preservation

Voice preservation is the editorial discipline of recognizing and protecting the specific qualities of a writer's prose that constitute voice—the irreducible signature of a particular consciousness expressed in language. Voice is not a property that can be defined in advance or identified mechanically; it is a quality that reveals itself to attentive reading as the feel of the writer's sentences, the characteristic movement of the mind through its material, the particular ratio of assertion to qualification, confidence to uncertainty, precision to suggestiveness. Voice often lives in the places where prose is least efficient: the long sentence that could be shorter, the digression that could be cut, the repetition that seems redundant but is actually emphasis. The competent editor who optimizes for efficiency risks smoothing away these inefficiencies and, with them, the voice. The great editor is the one who can distinguish between inefficiency that is waste (genuinely redundant, genuinely distracting) and inefficiency that is voice (the specific rhythm and texture that make this prose this writer's). This distinction