Good voice is writing that’s unchained from a single register. This is why default AI sounds so robotic: even if you prompt it with the precise style you want, it applies the same approach to every single sentence to make a monotonous caricature. No matter what it is, it’s numbingly uniform.

I find that if a writer gets caught in any register (only hilarious, only referencing Aristotle, only confessing terrible things, every sentence is a metaphor), it becomes annoying and unbelievable. We probably all have our default register. I get annoyed when I catch myself stuck in an analytical register. People don’t act like this IRL. People are 75-sided and context dependent.

As a writer skirts over different objects of focus, the tone should alternate between opposite modes: certainty and doubt, anger and love, approachability and authority, active voice and passive voice. There’s obviously no single tone that’s better than any other, but adaptive tone is better (=more organic) than drone tone.

Organic voice is, I think, one of the halmarks of the essay. While other genres are locked into specific registers (research papers are certain, neutral, and authoritative, with terrible passive constructions to capture every nuance), essays are exciting because they capture the multitudes of expression.