Critique Group Tip: When It's Not "Voice"
Most of us have a style preference as readers, and we almost certainly have one as writers. This can create issues when it comes to critiques or (as I discovered in high school journalism) making edits.
Voice is an asset in writing and I encourage anyone who writes to cultivate a voice. This can be inspired by other writers you enjoy, or, better yet, based on your unique way of experiencing the world. Perhaps, it's a blend of both, and that's fine.
If you have recently started writing and you've recently joined a critique group---or if your only writing experience up until now is self-publishing--it's possible you've received a critique with heavy line edits from your partners. Maybe they have comments on your punctuation. Maybe they have comments on your sentence structure or use of "the man" instead of a character's name. Maybe they've harshly changed "for all intensive purposes" to "for all intents and purposes." Maybe you're feeling embarrassed or upset by these comments.
I invite you to take a deep breath and entertain the thought that your partners have made valid points. Yes, they could be wrong, but they could be right.
Even if you never intend to be professionally published, your work will have a better reputation and better lasting power (read: stronger sales with less effort over time---as in a lower marketing budget for you,) if it's easy to read. Lee Child and Janet Evanovich are not bestsellers because of their stylistic prowess or highly developed characters, but they are easy to read. The prose in those books is almost effortless to read because it's grammatically correct, uses simple sentence structure (properly,) and use of $10 words where they aren't necessary is minimal.
Even Ernest Hemingway, who was a literary genius, used simple language and short sentences. Mark Twain also tended to lean toward the more stripped-down style.
"But wait!" You say. "I want to write like Faulkner or Nabakov! I want to write fantasy like Tolkien complete with the Hobbit songs because I think it's so much prettier than that sparse crap you just referred to."
Fair enough. Feel free to do that, but make sure you are doing it correctly.
Before you try to throttle your critique partners for trying to snuff out your nascent talent, make sure you know what you're doing. My suggestion? Check yourself.
Have you read The Elements of Style? It's short. If you haven't read it, go and read it.
Have you ever taken a course in academic writing or formal writing? Yes, even if you only earned As in English, have you taken a college-level class in writing? If not and you're getting those ugly marks on your pages, go do that.
Do you really know what subject verb agreement is in a sentence? Based on most of what I've read in critique groups, you probably don't.
Dialogue: yes, there's a correct way to punctuate dialogue, and most people do it wrong, but you can find a guide to it here.
Stop using cliches and stop writing them incorrectly if you just can't help yourself. Stop it with the malapropisms. Stop it!
I don't share any of this to be mean. I share it because I embarrassed myself for a long time and have been an asshole to a lot of people who took the time to try to show me what an idiot I sounded like. If you're reading this, I know you care about your writing and that you're not an idiot. Writing is hard, and it takes practice. For the most, part, it's impossible to say what is correct and what is incorrect, however, for the things that can be correct and incorrect, please do it them correctly.