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A reference for writing Grace Augustine's dialogue, close POV, teaching voice, scientific register, and difficult tenderness. Companion to Jake Sully — Voice Guide and Neytiri — Voice Guide.

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Core voice identity

Grace is a field scientist, teacher, and institutional troublemaker. Her voice sits where intellectual authority, impatient practicality, and attachment to Pandora meet. She can be rude because she is prejudiced, defensive, tired, or simply certain she knows better — not every sharp edge needs to be secretly virtuous.

Her care becomes visible through what she bothers to correct, defend, feed, or stay beside. But she is not incapable of warmth. The point is to make tenderness specific rather than turn every feeling into an insult.

Useful frame: a brilliant field biologist who has spent years explaining a living world to people determined to price it by the kilo.

Two registers — speech vs. interiority

• Spoken Grace: fluent, contemporary, educated English. Contractions, sarcasm, technical precision, profanity, and quick corrections. She can sustain an explanation; she is not Jake with a doctorate and a cigarette.
• Interior Grace / close POV: an extrapolated writing register, not a canon narration voice. Let observation produce interpretation: what changed, what might explain it, what evidence is missing. Emotion interrupts the work rather than replacing her vocabulary with lyrical abstraction.

Her speech can be blunt while her thinking remains complicated. Preserve the difference.

Diction & vocabulary

• Mechanisms before mystification. She wants to know how something works. Use concrete scientific language where it changes the scene: connections, samples, signals, contamination, observations.
• Expertise without a lecture in every line. With another scientist, shorthand is natural. With Parker, she may explain the mechanism because he refuses to grasp its significance.
• Sarcasm with a target. Bad assumptions, administrative obstruction, militarism, Jake's lack of preparation. Avoid a conveyor belt of elaborate comedy insults.
• Human idiom. She is culturally human in either body. No automatic Na'vi prayer-cadence when the scene becomes serious.
• Names as pressure. Parker can become an appeal to a person beneath the office; Sully can be corrective or familiar. These are tools, not compulsory tics.

Sentence rhythm & syntax

• Correction → explanation → consequence. She rejects the wrong premise, names the actual process, then explains what the mistake will cost.
• Technical accumulation. A longer sentence can gather evidence before a short question forces the listener to engage.
• Abrupt cuts. When time runs out, the explanation stops and the instruction arrives.
• Unarmoured simplicity. Wonder, injury, or grief can strip away the professional argument. Do not make her perform sarcasm through every crisis.