Preserving an Author's Voice (While Fixing Everything Else)
Preserving an Author's Voice (While Fixing Everything Else)
From the desk of Anne Weiss, Editor and Project Coordinator, Mangus Media Group
One of the most delicate and underrated skills in editing or ghostwriting is the ability to fix a piece of writing without erasing the person who wrote it.
It sounds simple. Clean up the sentences, and you are done. The problem is that editing is never just a grammar exercise. It is also about rhythm. Intention. Personality. Word choice. Cadence. Syntax.
It is about voice, the most human part of writing. Preserving that voice while making everything else better? That is the hard part.
What Is "Voice" Anyway?
Voice is that intangible quality that makes you hear the author's presence in your head as you read. It is not just what they say—it is how they say it. A teenager telling a story will sound wildly different from a pastor, a CEO, or a single mom with a knack for dark humor.
Voice lives in sentence length. Word choice. Patterns. Pacing. Even punctuation. An author's voice may be quirky, raw, meandering, lyrical, blunt, or poetic. It may even be inconsistent across a draft, but your job as an editor is not to flatten that voice to make it cleaner. Your job is to elevate it—to make it more itself.
What Editors Often Get Wrong
It can be seductive, especially for the novice editor or ghostwriter, to make everything "sound right." Sound good. Sound proper. Sound professional.
In doing so, they unwittingly remove everything personal from the writing.
I have read edits that were grammatically correct but emotionally oblivious. A gorgeously raw sentence was rewritten because it was not, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, in the proper structure. A fragmented sentence – an intentional echo of the speaker's stuttered pauses – was smoothed out into a fully formed, inanimate clunker.
Yes, it is clean. However, it is not real.
The voice does not always follow the rules. Sometimes, it breaks them intentionally.
The Invisible Edit
When I am editing, I often read a sentence aloud before I change it. I want to hear how it lands. Does it feel natural? Does it sound like the person I have been working with? Would they say it this way?
If not, I pause.
Editing someone else's voice takes humility. The goal is not to make it sound like me, even if my version is grammatically tighter or structurally firmer. The goal is to help the writer sound like the best version of themselves.
This often means:
Rewriting for clarity but keeping original phrasing where possible
Mirroring the sentence rhythm they naturally use
Letting go of a "perfect" edit if it changes tone too much
Leaving intentional fragments, slang, or informal constructions when they are part of the voice
Asking the author about phrases you are unsure of instead of assuming
Good editing is collaborative, even when the author is not present.
Final Thought: Editing as Stewardship
Above all, editing is about letting the author's voice shine. You are not the hero of the story. You are the caretaker of the story. You tend to its words, you safeguard the author's meaning, and you cultivate the soul of the story. Done well, you are invisible but not forgotten. The struggle to be invisible and to be unforgettable is what makes our craft beautiful: helping stories resonate with strength and clarity, all without becoming the focus of attention.
