Voice—What Does it Mean to You?—2nd Draft of short paper

So, now I have gone in and cleaned up my citations and changed some things in the paper…let’s see how this one works compared to the first!


Voice…a word heard many times, but what does it mean in composition studies? Peter Elbow wrote in Writing with Power, “…we all have a chest cavity unique in size so that each of us naturally resonates to one pitch alone” and for Elbow this is what he called voice, “often referring to something like style or tone—writing with real rhythm and texture” (qtd. in Harris: 24). Joseph Harris feels that voice “implies breath, spirit, presence, what comes before words and gives them life” (24). Personally, voice is something that is very important to papers. When reading someone else’s work I love to look for and listen for their voice to resonate through those words. It is almost like their voice is being heard in my mind, instead of my own. A person’s pain, joy, triumph, love, passion, anger, hate, vengefulness, lust, happiness, peace, etc. can be heard by a reader, but only if the writer allows freedom within their selves to let it come through in their writing.


Why would a student want to write a personal essay, use their Voice to be heard, and allow their emotions to show in their writing? I cannot help but agree with Terry Myers Zawacki when she writes in Recomposing as a Woman—An Essay in Different Voices, “I like its openness, how it pulls from here and there, observing, reflecting, moving through disconnections to make connections…the personal essay does not rely on positions staked out in advance, on straight arrangements, and tightly connected points leading to a single conclusion…differences can be cultivated” (315). To me the personal essay is just that, a personal essay where feelings are allowed to be expressed, views are allowed to be heard, and stances are allowed to be taken.

Joseph Harris in A Teaching Subject Composition Since 1966, speaks about in the 1960s and 1970s how the idea of “centrality of personal and expressive kinds of writing” started to come up again, even though they had as Harris says, “a long tradition of dissent in English to call on; they also had events of their time to respond to” (26). For instance in the 1960s issues with Vietnam were going on, Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking for equal rights, Kennedy was our president for a short time due to assassination, etc., but also open admission programs, community colleges, and financial aid started to allow opportunities for many students who never thought they were going to go to college (Harris 26). One of the strongest points Harris makes is “…we need to see many 1960s expressivist teachers of writing not as fleeing from politics but as engaged in a political defense to the student in her struggles to assert herself against what was seen as a dehumanizing corporate and university system” (26-27). Currently there are so many social struggles, political struggles, and personal struggles going on that students need to be able to assert themselves in the university system. So, how does one allow a student to deal with their personal struggles in the world in a writing classroom? Allow the student the opportunity to discover and use their Voice.

Now the question turns to how do composition teachers teach voice in the classroom? To discuss how to teach Voice in the classroom, I am referencing Donald Murray’s article Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent. In this article Murray discusses taking away the responsibility from the teacher and giving it to the students and as he says, “I do get discouraged, mostly because the students have had no freedom, and when they find their own voice it has not been tempered by experience” (118). He even goes further and believes that because of the “teacher-centered educational system” students are kept basically at a level of adolescence up until and sometimes beyond, them getting their Ph.D (Murray 118). Murray tells us the four responsibilities that belong to the student are: first, a student must find their own subject; second, a student has to document his own subject; third, students must earn their audiences respect; and fourth, students need to practice many forms of writing (119-120). He gives us the four responsibilities of teachers as well: first, create psychological and physical environments where the student can fulfill his responsibilities; second, enforce deadlines; third, cultivate a climate of failure; and fourth, teachers are only diagnosticians, reading only papers students feel they are having problems with (121-122). Currently, and speaking from personal experience, writing classes have been about the teacher or professor completing all of my major writing assignments for me. Murray also resonates this statement, “the composition teacher not only denies his students freedom, he even goes further and performs the key writing tasks for his students” (118).

Going back to Zawacki’s article, she brings up something that I find incredibly important. She speaks of an experience in which she wants to present the idea of a new course where alternative writing could be taught as opposed to academic discourse and to her shock she found out that others did not agree there were other types of writing to be taught in the classroom (Zawacki 315). Zawacki had become very interested in articles about “valuing the personal essay as a mode of inquiry in the academy…particularly interested in articles about the link between the personal essay and feminine forms of knowledge and expression” (315). Now I know you are wondering why I am bringing up the point of feminine knowledge and expression, but it is crucial, in my eyes, because for so long men were the dominating force in all writing, and women had to learn from men and their writing, especially academically. Women were interviewed by Mary Belenky and her co-authors in Women’s Ways of Knowing, about the notion of being able to bring the rational with the emotional and unifying knowledge learned from others around them and as one woman put it, “letting the inside out and the outside in” (qtd. in Zawacki: 315). Zawacki also talks about reading in Elizabeth Flynn’s article Composing as a Woman, and I agree wholeheartedly with this idea, that some of the women students she had finally realized their Voice was as powerful, if not more powerful than the external voices and this allowed many of them to steer towards authenticating their own Voice (315).

A powerful statement made by Zawacki is, “we may have to risk focusing on gender differences if we want to hear Voices which have been marginalized or silenced by our insistence on rational argument as the prevailing mode of discourse in the academy” (316). After reading Murray’s idea of a classroom, Zawacki’s article, and Harris’s chapter on Voice, I believe that if we don’t want to focus on gender differences in writing than we need to give Voice power and maybe use a classroom like Murray’s to allow our students the opportunity to explore and play with different types of form in writing and as Murray says, “…the teacher of composition may return to his important educational role when rhetoric—the art of effective and responsible argument—was the foundation of a classical education” (123). Let the teachers be the guidance, but allow the students to teach one another, and allow people the opportunity to use their Voice in a very powerful way, Writing.