Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.

Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. Each of my lessons will give you the insight to appreciate fine sentences and the vocabulary to talk about them.

Be bold. Be fast. Get to the point right away. The best email communication is simple and clear.

Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.

Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry?

There is no one way to render an idea. Let’s explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive.

Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.