A writers’ voice can easily change the mood of a story, whether it be a happy story or a drastic one. The voice that the writer projects through the selection of words and sentence structure shapes the story and defines its most ponderous points. When Mary Maclane wrote “Me”, she used a wide span of vocabulary that shaped the sentences into a more personal piece of writing. When Langston Hughes wrote “Salvation”, he used longer sentences to portray the important detail and feeling into the short story. Voice is determined by the selection of vocabulary, sentence variety, and tone of the authors’ story. The way the author presents his story very much depends on the voice that he chooses to use and how he chooses to portray it.
Moreover, the vocabulary used in any piece is what dictates the complexity of the writers’ mind and situation of writing. During “Salvation”, Hughes describes the scene by using complex adjectives to paint a picture of the case scenario. “When things quieted down, in a hushed silence, punctuated by a few ecstatic “Amens,” all the new lambs were blessed in the name of God.” Hughes used ‘punctuated’ and ‘ecstatic’ to allow the reader to visualize the scene. The vocabulary he chooses to use makes his piece look more like a story that was thought about and was written with time and effort and tremendous detail where as in “Me”, Mary Maclane has more of a spontaneous outlook of her story. She uses many complex but secrete words to give her piece more of a personal type of writing. “I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed.” She describes herself with words that are commonly used in her everyday speech, as so she renders. She uses “attained” to expose a type of confidence in her ‘egotism’. She calls herself rare so that the reader can see that she is proud and unashamed to be such an incomprehensible person. The selection of words that a writer chooses plays a large role in determining the voice of the story.