Writing Voice Exercises: Fancy or Folksy with Erin Lebacqz

Erin Lebacqz tells us how the Fancy or Folksy exercise is useful when teaching business writing to professionals in the public service sector. Find more from Erin at HighValueWriting.com.

Anne: Hello, welcome back again to talk about writing voice. I'm here with my friend Erin Lebacqz again. And Erin has already told us about 1 of the exercises she found useful. Now we're going to talk about something that she finds useful in her role as a writing teacher. Right?

So Erin, tell us about the kind of people you work with when you teach writing.

Erin: I work with folks who are writing for work, which is often almost all of us writing in some way for work, right? An email or a post or a comment or something like that. And we talk, I work specifically often with the public sector and people who serve our community and our public.

Anne: Great. So In your role as a teacher of writing, did any of the writing voice exercises seem useful to you as something that maybe you can use or apply in your teaching?

Erin: Definitely. I often come across a sort of debate, especially in public sector classes and sometimes private sector as well, about how much we want our writing to sound very formal and fancy and potentially bureaucratic, or how sort of interactive and informal and modern, you know, to some views, we should be with our writing. And often, you know, we have a lot of people with different views in class. And so I thought if we did the folksy and fancy exercise, it would be very revealing, no matter which side you tend to do yourself, you're able to see sort of the, you know, risks of going too far in either direction by trying that exercise.

Anne: That's great. And for those of you who don't know it, the folksy or fancy exercises asks you to write at both extremes, just as folksy and informal as you can be, and as fancy and obscure as you can be. And it's, I don't know, I found it kind of fun myself. I don't know if you did too, but.

Erin: Yeah, it was fun. And you know, I went from writing something like, et cetera, dude, you know, and then over here I'm using superlative language and whatnot. And then you can kind of see how maybe neither is quite what we would want in many work situations. But it definitely would help me teach why it's important to use familiar common language that we can all use and understand with confidence.

Anne: That's great, great. I'm so glad it might help make the world a little bit clearer in the business writing world.