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Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction (review)

Books on writing tend to be filled with rules, admonishments, checklists, and examples of poorly written prose. Such works may intimidate; they rarely inspire. Their functional goal is typically to fix problematic syntax at the sentence or, at best, the paragraph level. Much more difficult than identifying and remedying comma splices or dangling participles is teaching how to write an effective non-fiction book — teaching how to organize, frame, and present a sustained argument in an appropriate, unified, and purposeful manner. As expressions of authorial judgement and taste, these higher-order skills depend on context: content, genre, audience, intent. But the larger scale and the intricate interrelationships among contextual factors make presenting examples more difficult, and advice often leans toward the theoretical. How, then, are writers of nonfiction books to learn how to develop the craft of writing and refine their authorial skills? Enter Stephen J. Pyne’s Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction. This work tackles higher-order writing skills head on. Readers reflect on writing as art and craft while learning how to design compelling architectures for non-fiction works and how to apply literary principles from the world of fiction — yes, fiction — to non-fiction writing. All writing, Pyne contends, is art; and lessons from literature can help make even scholarly writing more artistic, engaging, and enjoyable. ‘The ideal,’ Pyne writes, is ‘a message wrapped in the proper medium. It is a text in which all the parts knot together, in which the meaning is inextricable from design, perspective from plot, vision from voice. This, after all, is the premise behind nonfiction writing as