24/7 customer support
Professional writers
No plagiarism
Privacy guarantee
Affordable prices
94% of return customers
Free title page
Free bibliography
Free formatting
Free of plagiarism
Free delivery
| Home |
| Order form |
| Contact us |
| Blog |
| Voice and No Voice |
| Writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may by saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some Writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may by saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some kind of mixer rather than being uttered by a person. Extreme lack of voice is characteristic of bureaucratic memos, technical engineering writing, much sociology, many textbooks: Tests should reflect changes in learned behavior; the normal utilization of reliability estimates must be revised since it is assumed that we are not measuring a trait or innate mental capacity but rather an acquired skill or concept which can be measured incrementally. Thus scores should reflect changes from one administration to the next. [From an essay about education.] Nobody is at home here. In its extreme form, no voice is the armymanual style. But the sad truth is that the careful writing of most people lacks voice. Voice, in contrast, is what most people have in their speech but lack in their writing -- namely, a sound or texture -- the sound of "them." We recognize most of our friends on the phone before they say who they are. A few people get their voice into their writing. When you read a letter or something else they've written, it has the sound of them. It feels as though writing with voice has life in it. It's almost as though the breath makes the words themselves do some of the work of getting up off the page into our head as we read. We need only pass our eyes, like phonograph needles, along the grooves and magically sounds and meanings will form in our head. Here is a piece of expository writing in which I find voice. The scheme of thought I have outlined in this third lecture explains the balance of faculties that should be cultivated in scientific research. Imaginativeness and a critical temper are both necessary at all times, but neither is sufficient. The most imaginative scientists are by no means the most effective; at their worst, uncensored, they are cranks. Nor are the most critically minded. The man notorious for his dismissive criticisms, strenuous in the pursuit of error, is often unproductive, as if he had seared himself out of his own wits -- unless indeed his critical cast of mind was the consequence rather than the cause of his infertility. * Notice how that jargony piece of educational writing (and perhaps also the final clause in the Medawar excerpt) suffers from the writing process itself. That educational psychologist would never talk so. She must have had a sense of intended meaning and then constructed words to express it. The words lack breath or presence. If she had been talking rather than writing, that same intended meaning would have produced words which were more alive (however lacking in precision or conciseness). It would take her an extra step of revising -- and revising consciously for the sake of voice -- to change her written words so as to break out of that language-construction into a saying-of-words on paper. But just as often it works the other way. You have voice in your first draft and you revise it away. As you clarify your thinking or correct your language you dissipate the breath. We can see that happening in the two paragraphs below. The first one is an early draft in which I find voice. But I think the writer lost that voice when she revised her paragraph in an effort to make it assert one opinion more definitely. In the United States there is supposed to be freedom of expression, and yet there are laws against obscenity. No one can say what obscenity really is. And is obscene material really harmful? Maybe some forms of censorship are necessary, but this is just another instance of our country being called free when it is not. We should admit that freedom of expression is not truly realized in the United States, since the censoring of materials which are considered obscene constitute a definite limitation of this freedom. In giving a more focused emphasis to the paragraph she lost all the voice, breath, and rhythm that had given life to the first version. It's not surprising that most people don't get voice into their writing. Writing is so much slower and more troublesome than speaking. So many more decisions have to be made. You must form each word, one letter at a time and figure out the spelling. Writing needs punctuation; it has stricter and less familiar standards of grammar and usage. And in addition to all the extra rules involved in writing, we feel we'll be more harshly judged if we write something foolish or mistaken than if we just say it: "It's down in black and white." On those speaking occasions when we feel especially judged -for example during a job interview or when we meet a new person we want to impress but fear we won't -- even our speech is likely to lose voice: we are likely to speak carefully and even haltingly, choosing our words guardedly, thinking all the while about whether our words are clear, correct, and intelligent. If we heard a recording of our speech in that situation we would probably say that it doesn't sound like us or that it sounds as if we are trying to be someone else or that it doesn't sound like a real person at all. Imagine if all our speaking were done on occasions like that. Or worse yet, if we were graded and judged and told all our smallest mistakes every time we opened our mouths. We'd get painfully awkward and unnatural in speech. For most people, that is how writing is. They've never written unless required to do so in school, and every mistake on every piece of writing they've ever done was circled in red. No wonder most people's writing doesn't have voice -- doesn't sound lively and "like them" the way their speaking usually does. There are some people, of course, who lack voice even in their speech. They have developed a habit of speaking in a careful or guarded way so that you cannot hear any real rhythm and texture. Their speech sounds wooden, dead, fake. Some people who have sold their soul to a bureaucracy come to talk this way. Some people speak without voice who have immersed themselves in a lifelong effort to think logically or scientifically -- who have built up the habit of considering the validity of every word before they utter it. Some people lack voice in their speech who are simply very frightened: they experience all of life as a job interview for a job they doubt they'll get. It's easy to use this distinction between voice and no voice. We may disagree about borderline cases, but we can probably agree that it's valid and even useful to distinguish writing by whether the author breathed a sound and a human rhythm into it. It's easy to hear voice in this excerpt from Falconer by John Cheever (the main character is writing a letter) and lack of voice in the business card message that follows it: I can remember coming back to the Danieli on the Lido after a great day on the beach when we had both been solicited by practically everybody. It was at that hour when the terrible, the uniquely terrible band began to play terrible, terrible tangos and the beauties of the evening, the girls and boys in their handmade clothes, had begun to emerge. I can remember this but I don't choose to. The landscapes that come to mind are unpleasantly close to what one finds on greeting cards -- the snowbound farmhouse is recurrent -- but I would like to settle for something inconclusive. It is late in the day. We have spent the day on a beach. I can tell because we are burned from the sun and there is sand in my shoes. A taxi -- some hired livery -- has brought us to a provincial railroad station, an isolated place, and left us there. The station is locked and there is no town, no farmhouse, no sign of life around the place excepting a stray dog. When I look at the timetable nailed to the station house I realize that we are in Italy although I don't know where. I've chosen this memory because there are few specifies. We have either missed the train or there is no train or the train is late. I don't remember. I can't even remember laughter or a kiss or putting my arm around your shoulder as we sat on a hard bench in an empty provincial railroad station in some country where English was not spoken. The light was going, but going as it so often does, with a fanfare. All I really remember is a sense of your company and a sense of physical contentment. Jon's Taxi Service Our motto: To render at all times the most courteous, efficient, dependable and conscientious service human endeavor is able to devise. The voice/no voice distinction throws light on the odd case of Gertrude Stein. She doesn't just get voice into her writing. She heightens the effect by breaking rules in just such a way that we can't even tinderstand her meaning unless we actually say her words. She invents a trick to force us to hear her words, not just read them visually: And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath. It is not like stopping altogether which is what a period does stopping altogether has something to do with going on, but taking a breath well you are always taking a breath and why emphasize one breath rather than another breath. Anyway that is the way I felt about it and I felt that about it very very strongly. And so I almost never used a comma. GERTRUDE STEIN, "Poetry and Grammar," from Lectures in America ( New York, 1935). |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
24/7 customer support
Written from scratch papers only
Any citation style
Fully referenced
Never resold papers
275 words per page Courier New font