Editorial Stewardship in Independent Publishing January Edition Voice is not style. It is not vocabulary. It is not Polish. It's beyond these ideas of editing, grounded in a firm foundation of authenticity. Voice is the accumulation of thought, experience, cadence, and intent—expressed in language that belongs to a specific mind. When the voice is intact, a reader feels the presence of the author behind the words. When it is compromised, the work may still be clean, but it