Normally voice and tone refers to talking, but I sometimes see those two words referred to someone’s writing. What do those words mean in a writing (or reading?) context?
“Voice” usually refers to the general and idiosyncratic way a writer writes. Raymond Carver has a much different voice than William Faulkner, to give to extreme examples. Carver writes short, basic sentences and paragraphs, while Faulkner is more wordy.
“Tone” can mean various things, but often means things like is the writing humorous, satirical, ironic, dramatic, etc.
Put another way, “voice” is how we identify writers even if we don’t know who they are. Using Chuck’s example, if you heard Faulkner speaking, you might identify his spoken voice by the traits that distinguished it: his accent, his pausing, his favorite vocabulary, his pitch, etc. In his written voice, you’d also use his typical vocabulary and his ornate sentence structure, as well as how he’d employ certain subordinated clauses, oddities of punctuation, quirky tricks of dialect, and so forth.
It’s a fun game, among grad students in Lit., to identify passages by writing style alone with no writer listed. Of course I went to grad school pre-Google (pre-computer, actually) so maybe it’s not so much fun for well-read showoffs now.
Donald Westlake is one of those authors without a “voice.” He writes clean, straightforward, quick-to-read prose.
However, he wrote light comic crime capers under his own name and dark vicious sociopathic crime novels under the name Richard Stark. The characters, the incidents, the crimes, often were almost exactly alike from one series to the other. But you would never mistake them for one another because their tone is so different. It’s hard to realize they’re taking place in the same contemporary America.
Ellery Queen, another mystery writer, started out as a pretentiously slavishly imitation fop in the style of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance. As he grew older, he realized that world had vanished with the Depression and so started experimenting with other voices. He did a woman’s magazine book, a fake hard-boiled detective novel, and a screwball comedy before settling in to a kind of pastoral Americana. The tone didn’t radically change for all the changes in voice. His world was always somewhat well-to-do, educated, intellectual, basically law-abiding folks with a few ne’er-do-wells to cull. He never wrote about the lower classes or professional gangsters or immigrants or any group not part of mainstream society (with a couple of conspicuously bad exceptions).
Woody Allen is somewhat similar in his movies. He’s always within that same world, even when the underlying movie is very different.
To oversimplify: tone refers to the world we’re seeing; voice refers to way the writer wants to entertain us as see it.
Voice is also the category into which “active” and “passive” fall.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Not in the sense the OP is using it.
Some other authors with identifiable voices include Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Carver, Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Woody Allen (as an author, which is much like his speech as an actor), and Henry James.
Another type of voice is the voice of the first-person narrator. Huckleberry Finn has a distinct way of talking, for instance.
For most of these, you can often identify the work of the author by hearing or reading a passage even if you’ve unfamiliar with it. I remember one Mary Tyler Moore Show episode where Lou Grant starts reading this passage:
It’s pretty clear who the author is, even if you didn’t recognize it.
Of course, not all authors have this sort of voice. Some very good ones don’t develop a distinctive voice. But that’s fine.