References to Voice that I’ve Found over the Years: Peter Elbow  12/15 2/20/84 – Revision loses ‘juice’ of freewriting Natural syntax. Here’s an example of a piece of writing I did the other night about voice when I got myself steaming along. I think it has more than usual clarity and voice. Or at …

Here I’ll propose a possible model for the resonance in writing, which I call authentic voice. Intention and meaning: (a) when the words are 100% meaning, all meaning and no static–all the meanings cohere and work together; (b) when the words are 100% intended; not “sincere” except in the larger sense of calling on the …

Virginia Woolf shows that voice is what you lose if you pretend you don’t have a mind of your own – or try to fit the words to the needs of the audience, if the audience is not one that respects you. “I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need …

“Desert Island Discourse” is talking to yourself in your head. This helps people be most themselves, and it leads to very voice-ful writing, and a kind of solid, rich centered but unrigid sense of identity. In contrast, collaborative writing makes it harder for people to use their “gut voice”–or “personal voice” or “personally connected voice. …

To me, the main thing about the use of voice in teaching, and the quickest way to the source of good writing is getting the self behind words, not holding back, and bringing one’s whole heft to bear. This finesses the theoretical, literary questions: is there a self and how many do we have? And …

Semiotician Ferdinand Saussure discusses the “natural bond, the only true bond” between sound and sense (46). This natural bond is what magic produces, i.e. a magical bond. We see this connection between sound and body in songs, lyrics, poetry, and spells. Derrida says “this natural relationship would have been inverted by the original sin of …

Oliver Sacks describes that there is more voice in the signing of the hearing impaired. Sacks spends most of his time demonstrating that sign is not at all a pantomime language, but a “fully formalized and grammaticized” (122), left-hemisphere language. That said, “One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has …

Stacy Tibbets has a good point about how voice grows out of conflict. He’s thinking in the larger cultural context–about how strong voice of new journalism emerges when there’s no longer a moral and cultural consensus: people can no longer write “for everyone” in “our voice”–where it can all be taken for granted. Perhaps that …

Eva Hoffman has the best extended personal description I’ve seen of the idea that we have some kind of primal or individual voice down underneath everything. But she identifies it with silence! And yet even in saying this, she also does justice to the other idea of multiple voices–and the need and reality of them. …

Erika has a good metaphor for voice as being naked / wearing clothes. “Voice as you present it concentrates and values nakedness. In effect you say, “If only you can get down to the naked self, that bare voice, then you’ll have power.” The social constructivist, on the other hand, concentrates on and values clothing: …