A duck goes into a bar. He asks the bartender if he has any grapes, to which the bartender replies, “no”. The duck goes 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 day. 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, I tell this joke again: So, a duck waddles into a bar. He asks the dirtiest bartender in the already shoddy establishment, “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 once again. 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, and the duck’s immediate reply, “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. It addresses the audience, and it brings them into the bar with the duck through the changes in commentary. The joke makes you laugh and it makes you feel like you can see this ‘duck waddle’ and the ‘dirtiest bartender smugly replies’. The audience (you) is a driving force for most writers, for without them, no one at all will listen. These things are due my voice and strive to appease the audience’s expectations. In this case, the audience expects the joke to be funny, naturally. That is what I did with my voice.
Voice is mainly shown when emphasis is put on different words or phrases, and adjectives are an effective method of doing this. Voice is the style of how an idea is put on the page, because no idea is brand new and inventive. There will always be an outside influence in someone’s writing. That makes the ideas a compilation of those previous and not the writer’s individual 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. In his article Against the Grain, he states “I have learned to make allusions to ancient and modern texts to borrow authority for my beliefs.” He appears to be both arrogant and intelligent, and he does show this through his writing. Elbow rocks a little more personality when he teaches about free writing and finding a student’s own voice. Elbow’s Being a Writer says, “But I insist them as reasonable goals for my teaching, because if I taught well and if all the conditions for learning were good, I believe all my students could achieve them.” This shows his feelings, hopes, and opinions straight out without trying to avoid it at all.
Every author will add their own flair (voice, twist, emotion) to the piece they are writing. Without a firm, academic, voice-less structure there will always be, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a debatable and definable voice.
This voice can be debatable because there are 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.
Word placement truly thrives in poetry, 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 a 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 in 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 when the voice is assumed to be solely style.
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. The writer’s intentions are fully shown through their voice. The more voice used, the more emotion invoked, no matter the emotion intended. 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.
Frankfurt’s On Truth his explanation and analysis of Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of love. His voice is very dense and factual. Mine is a little more upbeat and hopefully easier to read and interpret. I agree with Frankfurt’s analysis, but in the following imitation, I hope to present it with my own voice.
Spinoza’s definition of love is something which brings joy to a person. If an external object brings joy to a person, and someone realizes how much joy that object brings, they are 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.
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.
Frankfurt writes “…people do tend to love what they feel helps them to “find themselves,” to discover “who they really are,” and to face life successfully without betraying or compromising their fundamental natures.” My imitation reads, “…Something brings joy, someone loves it, they find themselves through that.” As one can see, the meaning is lost in transition. I did not show the emphasis of ‘finding themselves’ or facing life successfully, and my imitation does not define that neatly as well. This was a weak point in my imitation.
My imitation straightforwardly states Spinoza’s definition of love, while Frankfurt originally makes the reader uncover that through the analysis. This is where I feel that my imitation is easier to understand than Frankfurt’s, which changes the meaning through the variations of the two texts.
In different environments, a new voices emerge. 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 some Japanese people, but from many American’s opinions, 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 history, culture, or projected point of view.
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 basic opinion or information is not copied, but 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 due to style, and I write a little differently from someone in the English department due to the content that I present on the page.
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 need to be well versed in the ways of English. As I am writing an English paper however, 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 of a non-voice, every piece will have a certain impression 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. Therefore, voice is not only style, as was the case I pleaded in Part I, it is content as well, for the information will be altered even the slightest bit with any different imitation or translation of an original piece of writing.
Posted by zwic7726 on October 21, 2008
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