The main goal of the presentation was to firstly, discuss the complex meaning of “voice” in writing: what is understood by “finding our own voice”, the relationship this concept entertains with “style”, and finally the important value of having a voice. As many have agreed on, the term is mainly used by teachers, professional writers and students usually to refer to a feature of style in composition and is also known as a metaphor for a persona, style or tone. Resource: Clark, I. (2011). Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing (2nd Edition). 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, chapter 7.

1. VOICE & STYLE
By: DARSIE BOWDEN
ISSUES in L2 WRITING Thursday 20th , April 2017 Chap 7
@Doha ZALLAG @Zainab EL IDRISSI @Ikram BENZOUINE

2. OUTLINE
Introduction
 A Little History
 Self Expression in the Writing classroom
 Voice as Role playing
 Critique of Voice
 Other metaphors ( see pgs. 294 ~ 295 )
 What about Style ?
Conclusion

3. Persona ?
Style ?
A feature in
writing ?
I DUNNO ? ! Our teacher
always says FIND YOUR
OWN VOICE??

4. • WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT VOICE IN WRITING ?
• WHAT IS UNDERSTOOD BY FINDING YOUR OWN VOICE WHEN YOU WRITE ?
• WHAT RELATIONSHIP DOES VOICE HAVE WITH STYLE ?
• IS HAVING ONE’S VOICE VALUABLE ? WHY MIGHT IT BE PROBLEMATIC ?
?? Can our voice change according to the audience ??

5. A LITTLE HISTORY . . .

6. A LITTLE HISTORY . . .
• The term ‘voice’ in writing first occured in composition studies in
1966.
• In 1970, It became very popular in composition classrooms.
Teachers tend to help students find their own voices in writing .

7. • There were merely two factors that contributed to the emergence of
‘voice’ in composition classes:
1. The term ‘voice’ was often associated with ‘the expressionist
school’.
 The expressionist school was a groundswell of sentiments reacting
against traditional ways of teaching writing.
 Students emerged from their writing classes able to produce writing
that was flawless mechaniclly, but also which seemed to indicate
that they clearly had nothing to say.

8. 2. Trends in composition tend to follow trends in politics:
 During the 1960 and early 1970, there was trouble on college
campuses in response to the unpopular and unsuccessful Vitnam
war.
 The institutionalized government, buisness and the universty
bureaucracies were persumed to be destructive to social value of
individuals, personal expression, equality , and freedom
 Outlets for self-expression in writing were suddenly highly valued.

9. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM . . .
Composition

10. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING
CLASSROOM . . .
A striking characteristic of many students’ verbal behavior is that they
‘sound’ one way when talking, and quite another way when writing. If they
have a consistent ‘voice’ at all, it is in the speech area. In contrast, their
writing is simply congeries of words, entirely lacking in any distinguishing
‘voice.’ One of the objectives of the talk-write pedagogy is to overcome this
modal distinction: on the one hand, the rapid alternation between vocal
and scribal activity should lead to a reshaping and vitalizing of the scribal
modes, so that the students’ written ‘voice’ begins to take on some of the
characteristics of the speaking ‘voice.’ (Zoellner, 1969: 301).

11. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING
CLASSROOM . . .
Voice refers to “what most people have in their speech but lack in their
writing” (Elbow, 1981: 288).
This perspective maintained that writers could find their own
voice writing if they trusted themselves and did the appropriate
exercises.

12. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING
CLASSROOM . . .
•Free Writing: It is a way for the writer to get at what
he truly feels, to generate ideas that are his alone, to
explore—or to find—his own words (his voice) on
paper without risk.

13. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING
CLASSROOM . . .
In that paper, a truthtelling voice speaks, and its rhythms rush and build
like the human mind travelling at high speed. Rhythm, rhythm, the best
writing depends so much upon it. But as in dancing, you can’t get
rhythm by giving yourself directions. You must feel the music and let
your body take its instructions. Classrooms aren’t usually rhythmic
places. (Macrorie,1985:160)

14. SELF EXPRESSION IN THE WRITING
CLASSROOM . . .
Your authentic voice is that authorial voice which sets you apart from
every living human being despite the number of common or shared
experiences you have with many others: it is not a copy of someone
else’s way of speaking or of perceiving the world. It is your way.
[……]Now the closer you come to rendering your particular perception
of your world in your words, the closer you will come to finding your
authentic voice. (Stewart, 1972:2–3)

15. VOICE AS ROLE PLAYING . . .
This concept emerged as a pedagogical model of the classroom imported from
Great Britain in the late 1960s.

16. VOICE AS ROLE PLAYING . . .
“ It is as if the author, as he “ puts on his act” for a reader, wore a kind of
disguise, taking on, for a particular purpose, a character who speaks to the
reader...; everything we know about him comes from the words before us on
the page. He is a made man, he is artificial.” (Gibson 1969)
In the service of conveying a message to an audience  his persona is created
for specific occasions (Gibson )

17. VOICE AS ROLE PLAYING . . .
“ In your natural way of producing words there is a sound, a texture, a
rhythm—a voice – which is the main source of power in your writing… this
voice is the force that will make a reader listen to you , the energy that
drives the meanings through his thick skull .. If u abandon it, you’ll likely
never have a voice and never be heard.” (ELBOW 1973)
Just as the SPOKEN VOICE has rhythm ,tone and intonations so can WRITING !!

18. VOICE AS ROLE PLAYING . . .
“ Just as you dress differently on different occasions, as a writer you assume different voices in different
situations. If you’re writing an essay about a personal experience, you may work hard to create a strong
personal voice in your essay. . . . If you’re writing a report of essay exam, you adopt a more formal, public
tone. Whatever the situation the choices you make as you write and revise. . . will determine how readers
interpret and respond to your presence in the text.” (Lisa Ede 1989)
A B

19. CRITIQUE OF VOICE . . .
A ) … B ) …
C ) …
D ) …

20. CRITIQUE OF VOICE . . .
A ) Major developments emerged with the voice
movement :
 Emphasis on the writing process .
 Emphasis on collaborative work !
 From personal writing to voice pedagogy

21. PERSONAL WRITING
 Considered expository writing ( critical, analytical, and argumentative writing ) both formal and
academic.
 Served as invention or prewriting
 Intended to help students write more fluidly in formal exposition.
~Up through 1960s
BY CONTRAST
VOICE PEDAGOGY
 Helped conceive of personal writing as a legitimate end product.
 Introduced into the composition classroom the changes that were going on in politics and society.
 Enabled to give attention to the individual writer ( those in marginalized social groups)  used by
activists including women, African Americans, Native Americans to talk about POWER.
~Since 1970s

22. CRITIQUE OF VOICE . . .
B ) Voice –Authentic Voice – has come under
attack :
# Hashimoto in College Composition and
Communication 1987
# Plato
# Derrida
pg. 292

23. HASHIMOTO argued:
 The approach taken by Peter Elbow promoted a kind of anti-intellectualism ..
 The way voice proponents urged students to tap into their emotional selves for their writing,
consciously ignoring the intellectual and discursive values of their community.
 Is it even possible to have one “ true” voice ?
 Whether this ,indeed, leads to power in writing ?
~College Composition and Communication (1987)
ALSO
PLATO argued :
 The spoken voice was often understood as being closer to thought and an authentic self; However:
Plato dismissed writing as inferior to speech because without the interaction between a giver and a
taker  we cannot get “ Truth”.
 Writing ,for him, gives us the semblance of objective truth  misleading and dangerous.
~Western History

24. NOTE
The notion of voice remains very popular. In Kathleen Yancey ‘s volume on voice:
much efforts have been made to reconfigure voice to make it fit in a postmodern,
technological, and multicultural era.
In another work on multiple voices, M.M.Bakhtin raised the issue of heteroglossia
in discourse: the idea that writers may not have one true voice, but rather many
voices each used in particular occasions and with particular audiences. STILL
THOUGH, a writer’s voice should be consistent + unified + stable if only for that
rhetorical instance.
 Let us explore the problem of voice in the theoretical + pedagogical ground of
the new century.

25. Other Metaphors: Women’s Studies

26. It is not uncommon in women’s and
feminist studies to assert that. . .
Women have long been deprived of having a voice in politics and
society. (p.294)
“Voice is a metaphor – a very powerful one. Metaphors, by
their very nature, enable us to talk about abstract concept (…)
that are difficult if not impossible to talk about in any other
way.” (p.285)

27. Two books make much of women’s
voices:

28. Ms Gilligan described
voice as…
)

29. It is worth noting that…
Gilligan’s book came a
reaction to Lawrence
Kohlberg’s stages of moral
development of children.
Kohlberg had argued that
girls on average reached a
lower level of moral
development than boys did.
Gilligan noted that the
participants of his study were
largely male.
Unlike Kohlberg, Gilligan’s In a
Different Voice purports to
take account of both men and
women.
She strives to emphasize that
women, like men, are capable
of thinking with justice and
care:
She found that women define
who they are by describing
relationships unline men.

30. “For one voice to speak, another must be silenced or somehow
incorporated. For good or ill, this discourse style most often leads to
acquisition of social goods in our society, that is, money, status, and power.
By contrast, women’s discourse—and this is a theory that Gilligan’s book
promotes so persuasively—tends to view the repair and maintenance of
social networks as a priority. Here, voice may not come into play at all; in
fact, silence has a value, because it assumes listening, hearing, thinking,
caring, and embracing.”
Gilligan maintains that psychology wants to think of women as
men. Her theory of power discourse holds that women do not seek
power or dominance through their voice. Rather, women tend to
solve ethical dilemmas without having to be at the expense of
others.

31. Women’s Ways of Knowing: Development of
Self, Voice, and Mind
This study examined the
epistemology, or “ways of
knowing”, of a diverse group of
women with a focus on identity
and intellectual development.
The 135 women who
participated ranged from age 16
and 60, came from rural and
urban populations, and varied in
socioeconomic classn ethnicity
and educational history.
The assumptions of those
women were intimately linked to
their percpetions ofthemselves
and their relationships to their
world.
Their ways of knowing are
dependent on conceptions of
self (self), relationship with
others (voice) and understanding
of the origins and identity of
truth and authority (mind).

32. “In Women’s Ways of Knowing, many of the women interviewed by the
authors talk about their desire to find their voice, a voice that will be heard,
presumably in a world that is populated with other, often male voices that
tend to drown out theirs. These uses of voice have considerable resonance
with the way voice was used in the 1970s. Perhaps it is true that finding
one’s voice and using that voice leads to power in a male-dominated
society where having a voice is seen to be the source of that power.”
Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule argue that voice in
women’s discourse serves their connectedness within their social
network.

33. Voice as Network?
“The idea of a network assumes that there is not
necessarily one individual holding sway over another or
others, but a web of interconnected strands—wherein
much of the power lies in the connectedness and
wherein the integrity of the individual is, although not
irrelevant, certainly secondary.”

34. What about Style?

35. Style Vs Voice: The author argues…
“If one conceives of the work of writers as
participating in a network, then stylistic choices
(vocabulary, sentencing, structure, & other aspects
of form) stem from the interaction between writer,
audience, context, and purpose—in other words,
from a consideration of how the piece fits, frames,
and adjusts the network.”

36. Powerful style is style
shaped for specific
purposes rather than
personal passions.
Although the ability to
write well in one’s own
voice is quite often the
result of innate talent,
style is not.
•Style and craft can be
taught and learned, not a
result of innate talent.
•Teachers need to make
students aware of how
style contributes to
effectiveness in writing.

37. Questions to Ponder over:
Do you feel you have your own, identifiable
voice?
If not, is having a voice in writing something
you aspire to have?

38. Conclusion :
• Students should be encouraged to practice frequent and regular free
writing exercises.
• Students can use writing for different tasks.
• Students can share their writings to get feedback on real voice.

39. TANK U
ISSUES in L2 WRITING VOICE & STYLE By: DARSIE BOWDEN
@Doha ZALLAG @Zainab EL IDRISSI @Ikram BENZOUINE