Z’s Blog ‘08

19

Paper #2 Draft

Voice, It’s How You Say It

Part I:

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Voice is one of the most difficult things to define in writing.  The debate rages between content and style, and both sides have strong arguments.  Anyone can scribe ideas spewed forth by their predecessors, and that is not their voice.  Their voice comes into play the way a student writes it.  No one can dictate how another writes or whether it has voice or not.  Every writing has voice. 

It does not matter whether the student is an undergraduate in college or an English scholar out in the world, their writing will contain some of their personal influence. Bartholomae has a pretty dry voice when trying to sound very scholarly, but he has it.  Elbow rocks a little more personality when he teaches about free writing and finding a student’s own voice.  Every author will add their own flair to the piece they are writing.  Without a base structure, this is what a piece without voice sounds like, there will always be, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a debatable voice.

This voice can be debatable because there can be two questions to address this: The first deals with intent on word placement; Did he put the word success here instead of there for a reason?  The second addresses intentions of sentences; Is this meant to be sarcastic, or does she really mean that she is thankful for the dog chewing up the shoe?  The answer to these two questions solves what voice is.

The word placement truly thrives in a poetic atmosphere, but it can make or break a scholarly article.  With every word in the correct place, the writer will be able to get their point across as effectively as possible.  If something is placed towards the beginning or end of sentence, it can dramatically change the effect of a sentence.  [It can dramatically affect a sentence if something is placed towards the beginning or end of a sentence]  The writer decides each of these minute adjustments every sentence to fine-tune and improve their writing for either their own happiness or the reader’s comprehension.  The placement of certain fragments or objects is vital to a writer’s voice.  If one of these things is off, their voice is altered just a little bit.

The submerged intentions bring to light a more direct voice.  In my essays, I tend to get bored with the straight, ‘no-voice’, monotone writing.  My writing flourishes when I use humor, witty remarks, or little tid-bits of sarcasm.  By adding these elements, the writer becomes more in conversation with their audience.  This is not only acknowledging the audience, it is bringing them into your writing.  It makes the reader laugh, cry, or become angry, not because of what you said, but because of how you said it. 

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I’d like to tell a joke:  A duck walks into a bar. He asks the bartender if he has any grapes, to which the bartender replies, “no”.  The duck comes in several more times through the week and the same thing happens.  Finally, the duck asks the question again, and the bartender says, “no, and if you ask me again, I’ll nail your feet to the ground.”  The duck leaves, and returns the next say.  This time, he asks him if he has any nails.  The bartender tells him, he does not have any, and the duck asks again if he has any grapes.

Now with words inserted or changed and a little more direct voice: So, a duck waddles into a bar.  He asks the dirtiest bartender, “Do you have any grapes?” The bartender says smugly, “No, now get out of here.”  The duck turns around and leaves. The next day the duck does the same thing.  And once again, the bartender does not have any grapes, so he leaves.  The duck proceeds to visit the same bar and ask the same question to the same bartender and gets the same answer.  Each time though, the bartender becomes more and more angry.  After a few days of this, the bartender changes his reply, “No, I do not have any grapes, and if you ask again, I am going to nail your webbed feet to the ground!”  The next day, the duck waddles his little tail into the bar and asks the dirty bartender, “Got any nails?”  When the bartender explained he did not have any nails, the duck’s immediate reply was, “Well then, do ya got any grapes?”

The second joke is more personal and full of voice.  They both tell the same story, but the second puts a little more personality into it, and the biggest definition of personality in an English essay is personality.  The joke makes you laugh and it makes you feel like you can see this ‘duck waddle’ and the ‘dirtiest bartender smugly' reply.  These things are due my voice.  The more voice used, the more emotion invoked.  A story about homelessness would be emotion filling, but if the author is passionate and shows that, they will make the reader feel ten times more emotional about the subject.

Part II:

Spinoza’s definition of love is something which brings joy to a person.  Any external object that brings joy to a person, and someone realizes how much joy that object brings is in love with that object.  Love is extreme joy brought by someone or something.  This brings to the forefront, the argument that one can love anything that ultimately brings them great joy.  This joy keeps them going and makes them who they are.  Spinoza is basically correct.  Many examples do follow this pattern; Something brings joy, someone loves it, they find themselves through that.  This keeps them on the path that they have set.

Spinoza also says, “One who loves necessarily strives to have present and preserve the things he loves” (Ethics, part III, proposition 11, scholium).The things that he loves are most important to him.  His life, his joy, and his personal self depend on these.  Naturally, he will do anything to protect them and make sure that they are always there for him.

Part III:

After imitating Frankfurt’s passage in On Truth, I realized that voice is not only how you say what you say, but voice is what you say as well.  This exercise led me to feel that one’s own opinions are just as important as the method in which one puts them on paper.

The issue I had with this before the imitation was that the ideas are never new.  They will be a combination of how things that you have learned, and all of these will be put onto paper generally the same by one scholar or another.  I was wrong.  Through writing my version of the passage, I did end up altering the meaning a little bit to put my own voice in there.  Voice has always been something that is fun for me to test and play with, and I feel that everyone plays with voice in their writing.

When someone is writing a history essay, their voice comes through; When someone is writing an analytical essay, their voice can be heard; When another person is writing a newspaper story, their voice will be prominent.  Their voice has to be prominent.  The words on the page are vital to the method in which the author intended for the reader to interpret, and the feeling evoked is something that comes from the soul.  The ideas on the pages are important to the writer’s voices just as much.

The ideas tell the reader who they are listening to.  If the reader is learning the information presented, they are directly learning the writer’s opinion.  The writer’s opinion, whether right or wrong, fact based or biased, is what the reader will respond to.  They have to because there are as many ways to discuss a topic as there are writers.  An attack on Pearl Harbor is seen as an act of heroism by the Japanese, but from the American side, it was an utter blood boiler.  From another Japanese stand point is the fact that they sneak attacked Hawaii, and they feel bad.  From the other American’s, we were being terrible and karma finally caught up.  The information depends on the writer’s intent.

The complications in defining voice, is that everything can be tweaked a little bit, and is tweaked a little bit through translation and interpretation of the facts.  The snide comments and weak jokes are more direct results of voice, but the information and the words on the paper are indirect voice because of the personal touch that every author addresses his pieces of writing.  There is no set way for presenting information, writing, or telling stories, so the person doing it at the time is the one setting the precedence.  Their precedence is not followed by many, and the next person will present the same bunch of information and use their own correlations to voice.  I write a million times differently from someone in the biology department. 

This sets the standard for voice.  Though there is some discrepancy on how the term voice is defined, it also varies through discourses.  In an English classroom, my voice will be effective, but in the football locker room, my voice changes drastically.  I will write get ‘em or post some billboard material over what was written because I do not want to be well versed in the ways of English.  As I am writing an English paper, I will try to be witty and articulate.  The different scenarios will change the differences in voice. 

With the imitation exercise fresh in my mind and different discourses also, I feel that voice is everything about writing.  What you write and how you write will be integrated in the world soon enough, but the base line is that there is no baseline.  Without an example if a non-voice, every piece will have a certain connotation of voice, making it impossible to define voice as either the substance of the paper or the style, but it will forever be combined into both.