One of our goals this week was to delineate the differences between writing for the ear and writing for the eye. Properly revising your writing to match the form of how it will be received is a great way to ensure that your message will be communicated how you intend it to be. 

As an example of this, if I were speaking to communicate the same point as above, I would never say something with long sentences like that. I can still write down what I want to say but the perspective and details I share will be much different. If I knew I was speaking, I would probably write along the lines of, “There is a huge difference between writing for the ear and writing for the eye. Identifying these differences will make you a much better writer.” But because this is a blog and I know the reader can take in more detail by reading, I made a choice as a writer to start with more details than I would’ve if I was speaking. 

The combination of working on my personal brand outline and learning/reading more about the writing process this week helped reveal a new aspect of the writing process to me. What it revealed should make the revision process less daunting and more clear on what decisions to make when the process gets complex. 

The personal brand assignment aims to practice writing and revising for a listening audience. In addition, it is practice for presenting ourselves and the values that are most important to us (to a potential employer). As a part of completing the outline, I had to identify what values mean the most to me, but also how the combination of those values makes me unique as an individual. 

I found that identifying the values that I want to communicate about myself through the brand assignment is also what I want to communicate about myself through my writing. In the revision process deciding whether to add detail or subtract detail to strengthen a point, personal values should be the motivation behind the decision making. 

Further, what this discovery helped me understand is the difference between, personality and style. Zinnser discusses that having an individual style is important and should be recognizable by readers. For example, Zinnser writes “There is a kind of writing that sounds so relaxed that you think you hear the author talking to you. E. B. White was probably its best practitioner.”     (p. 231). To achieve that type of impact on the reader while maintaining a distinctive style requires mastery. 

But E.B White has an advantage over many writers in the digital age. White is best known for long-form fictional writing. In the digital age, most writing has to be short-form otherwise it won’t get read. Additionally, the topics that writers have to cover to sustain themselves can have a significant range. 

Zinnser writes, “I wrote one book about baseball and one about jazz… I tried to write them both in the best English I could, in my usual style… Though the books were widely different in subject, I wanted readers to know that they were hearing from the same person.” (p. 231). Zinnser was under the perspective that maintaining his distinctive style was the most important factor when considering style. What he later realized was that he should write one book in “sports English” and one in “jazz English”. In completely different styles. 

Trying to achieve a style change while maintaining his own voice might seem challenging. However, it simply becomes a problem-solving issue of communicating your personal values to match the new style of your writing. This can only be achieved if a writer is able to identify what is most important for them to share. In other words, style is changeable, and personal values are not. So, if the style is not the most advantageous for the topic or form, the writer has to adapt the way that they communicate their values.