Writing Down a Voice Without Flattening It

A translator I once worked with turned "the river came into the house and took my mother's pots" into "the flood inundated the residence, destroying household possessions," and handed it back to me proud of the grammar. He had not lied about a single fact. He had also removed every trace of the person who said it.

Flattening does not usually look like distortion. It looks like improvement. A sentence with an unusual word order gets straightened. A concrete noun, pots, gets replaced by an abstract one, possessions, because abstraction reads as more serious. The result is grammatically cleaner and biographically empty: the sentence could have been said by anyone, which means it was no longer said by the person who actually said it.

The register ratio

I check every written sentence against what I call the register ratio: of the content words in my written version, how many would the speaker herself have chosen, and how many are substitutions I made for the sake of what I was taught to think of as good prose. I count them by hand. A sentence that swaps three of six content words for more literary equivalents has a register ratio of fifty percent, and in my own editing that is the line past which the sentence has stopped being a record and started being a composition with a source.

Take the sentence about the river. Original testimony, from a woman named Justina Quispe in Paucartambo describing the 1999 floods: "the river came into the house and took my mother's pots." Six content words: river, came, house, took, mother, pots. The literary version replaces river with flood, came into with inundated, house with residence, took with destroyed, pots with possessions. Five of six substituted. Register ratio of seventeen percent, meaning only one word in six is still hers. That is not an edit. That is a different author wearing her sentence as a costume.

What preservation actually requires

I published Justina's sentence unchanged, exactly as she said it, and the discomfort some early readers felt with "took my mother's pots" instead of "destroyed her possessions" is, I think, the discomfort of meeting a specific woman instead of a general category called flood victim. Pots is a word that assumes a kitchen, a particular mother, dishes she owned before the water came. Possessions assumes nothing and therefore describes no one.

The register ratio is not an argument for leaving every sentence untouched. Spoken language has false starts, repeated words, and grammatical loose ends that a page has to tidy or become unreadable. What the ratio protects is content, not fluency: the actual nouns and verbs a person reached for, which carry more information about how they experienced an event than any amount of correct sentence structure. I will fix a dangling clause. I will not replace pots with possessions, because the ratio tells me exactly what that substitution costs, and I can see the cost on the page before I decide to pay it.

The honest objection

The obvious objection is that a low register ratio can also produce clumsy prose that undersells a serious testimony, and that readers used to polished nonfiction may mistake plain diction for a lack of craft. I concede this happens, and it happened with an early reader of Justina's account who told me the writing felt unfinished. It was not unfinished. It was declining to do the thing that makes writing feel finished, which is often smoothing away the specific in favour of the general.

I want to be exact about where the concession ends, because I do not think this objection defeats the method, only limits it. A testimony can be plain and still be composed: sentence length varied, repetition trimmed where it serves nothing, paragraph breaks placed where the speaker herself took a breath. None of that touches the register ratio, because none of it substitutes a word she did not choose. The craft moves into arrangement instead of vocabulary, which is a harder discipline to learn and a far more defensible one when someone asks where a sentence came from.

There is a genuine craft skill in keeping a sentence readable while holding its register ratio high, and it takes more editorial labour than substitution does, not less. Substituting possessions for pots takes ten seconds. Finding the sentence rhythm that lets pots sit comfortably next to the surrounding English prose, so the specificity reads as intentional rather than rough, took me most of an afternoon on that one line. The ratio does not make the work lighter. It tells you, precisely, what you are protecting and what it will cost you to keep it.