Code-Switching and the Freelance Writer

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When you make your living as a freelance writer, you need to be able to turn on a dime in terms of style. One day, you might have a deadline on an academic journal article in which you need to observe strict MLA style. The next day, your assignment may be a short blog post for an entertainment website; now you have to shift gears dramatically, writing in a relaxed, conversational tone. Challenging to say the least-- and one of many reasons that flexibility is one of the most essential secrets to freelance success.

Some writers’ natural writing voices are quite colloquial; the reader almost feels as if the author is in the room with her, having a conversation. At the other end of the spectrum are those whose voices are naturally academic or “highbrow.” Most fall somewhere along the spectrum between these two poles.

It’s an open question among writers to what degree writing should mimic speech in any given forum. The real ninjas, I think, are the ones who manage to sound conversational (in those media in which it’s appropriate) while observing all the rules of English grammar, spelling and usage. These writers understand that the secret of coming across as both accessible and professional lies in the rare synthesis of conversational style and flawless grammar.

Very few people speak in sentences that could be transcribed word-for-word and used in an article or blog post without some editing. Writing that concept for a “middlebrow” medium, you might write, “No one’s grammar is perfect when they’re having a conversation-- they have to make some adjustments when they put the words on paper.” If you were expressing the same thought in an academic journal, it might appear as, “Few people observe strict grammatical rules in colloquial speech; expressing the same ideas in print, they need to make the necessary adjustments to fit the new forum.”

But what if you were expressing the same idea in a highly informal setting, such as an entertainment or fashion blog? There, you might well get away with, “Hey, not many of us are walking English textbooks, right? We’ve got to make some changes when we write things down!” The fact is that all three of these examples are grammatically correct, even if the third might be a stretch in terms of usage. The important thing is that readers in any of these forums would clearly understand the idea without the jarring effect of having one style substituted for the other. For instance, imagine how thrown a reader of People Magazine would feel coming across the “few people observe strict grammatical rules...” sentence above. in the context of a People Magazine article. By the samw token, a reader of Scientific American would no doubt find “Hey, not many of us are walking English textbooks” equally jarring.

My own natural writing voice tends toward the formal end of the spectrum: phrases such as “highly colloquial setting” and “the rare synthesis of colloquial style and flawless grammar” pretty much give that away. Other writers have much more conversational voices. There’s no “right or wrong” here; the essential thing (again) is flexibility. Unless you’re getting all your work from a single source, a good deal of code-switching is going to be necessary.

Of course, none of this quite takes into consideration the unique degree of flex required of the ghostwriter. To succeed, ghostwriters have to carefully read all their clients’ correspondence and attend closely to their patterns of speech. This is because the stakes are higher here: people who know the “author” personally have to believe she could have written the article or manuscript herself; otherwise the ghostwriter has failed at his most important task. If words and phrases completely alien to the client start cropping up in a manuscript, people who communicate with her regularly are going to have their doubts about the authorship.

Contrasting and comparing patterns of speech with the production of grammatically-correct prose is a source of inexhaustible fascination for wordsmiths. Or to put it another way, Dude! Those grammar wonks never get tired of checking out the way people write and talk, right?

Perhaps something in between.

Best regards,

William K. Ferro

Copyright Ⓒ 2013 by William K. Ferro

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