A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Persona and Performance

6 } Another way to think about your persona is to consider it an essential element in a performance of sorts.To take part in a performance may seem like a fanciful—and somewhat devious—thing to do in your writing. But most of us perform a variety of roles every day of our lives, given the different people we encounter—at one moment with friends, at another with the boss, at another with colleagues, at another with loved ones. With each of them, we tend to behave and talk in a somewhat different way, presenting a different version of ourselves, a different persona, that resonates both with them and with a distinctive aspect of ourselves. And we change not only because of the person(s) at hand but also because of our mood or the gist of what we’re saying. So it’s not at all far-­ fetched to think we might do the same thing in our writing. Or, as E. B. White says, the essayist can “be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.” The ability to adopt a changing persona is essential not only to writing effective essays but also to producing such varied kinds of writing as personal letters, blogs, technical reports, newsletters, opinion pieces, and analyses . And the practice of adapting one’s persona to such Persona and Performance { 7 varied prose has a long and distinguished history, as you can see from the following passages, all by Benjamin Franklin: (1) About this time I met with an odd volume of The Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished if possible, to imitate it. (2) Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. (3) There is in every village a vacant dwelling, called the strangers’ house. Here they are placed, while the old men go round from hut to hut, acquainting the inhabitants that strangers are arrived, who are probably hungry and weary; and everyone sends them what he can spare of victuals; and skins to repose on. Each of these pieces stands out from the others not only because of its content but also because of its point of view and style—each so distinctive they could have been written by threedifferent people.The first one, from Franklin’s autobiography, is marked by its very personal manner, by the predominance of “I,” also by its plain diction and relatively short sentences, as if its author were as frank and unassuming as the style of his personal account . The second passage, by contrast, is very stylized, each sentence in the imperative mode, the voice of com- 8 } mand, each sentence tersely phrased in the manner of an aphorism, and each sentence balanced in the same way to emphasize a cause-­ and-­ effect morality, as if its author were a very self-­confident preacheror teacher. A persona that Franklin evidently felt free to assume, given that in this case he was concluding a letter to a young man who had solicited his opinion on early marriages. The third passage, on theother hand, has neither the plain personal manner of the first nor the authoritarian style of the second . Instead, its third-­ person point of view and matter-­ of-­ fact style, describing village behavior in a lengthy and detailed sentence, creates the impresssion of having been written by an objective observer, somewhat like a latter-­ day cultural anthropologist, a stance that Franklin must have wanted to assume in this instance because he was writing a pamphlet attempting to dispel the prejudices of colonial Americans about the native American Indians . So the content, point of view, and style of each passage project a different self created by Franklin to meet a complex set of circumstances existing as much outside him as within him. If changing styles and stances seem to compromise a writer’s integrity, consider the folly of ignoring such adaptive behavior—imagine Franklin writing about the Indians in the personal mode of his autobiography. It would be as inappropriate as attending a...