If life gives you lemons

Essay 2 Final: Voix

Please read pages 44-46 of Harry G. Frankfurt’s book On Truth, else you totally won’t understand what this essay is about.

I was reading a book, and there was someone named Baruch Spinoza in it (that’s a weird name). He is an ancient philosopher from 300 years ago. And he talks about why I love my stuff. I love my stuff because it makes me happy. But he also says that I love my stuff because it makes me “more fully themselves”.  I guess that means that it makes me who I am. I think that this is true.  I don’t know if he gots it all right, but he’s close. I wouldn’t love my T.V. as much if it didn’t make me happy. Mr. Spinoza also says that we will protect the things we love. We do this cause we want to keep us “more fully themselves”.  And if our stuff is destroyed then we won’t be happy anymore. I know I’ll protect my stuff from other bad people.

Now, if you had done the reading assignment that I gave you up top, you would see a stark contrast in the Frankfurt’s passage and the paragraph above. The above paragraph says the same thing as Frankfurt. It holds the exact same content, but isn’t the voice different? Frankfurt uses academic vocabulary and compound sentences with many modifiers. The paragraph above uses simple words, short sentences, and is much more personal by using personal pronouns. The difference in voice completely changes how you feel about the subject. Frankfurt is able to convey authority in his passage. The paragraph above makes you chuckle and is easily dismissed as have little persuasive value.

Voice is a wonderful tool in writing. But what is it? It is style. Voice is changed easily by changing the vocabulary, word order, and grammar. To help prove my point, look at the following three examples. They state roughly the same thing, but the voice is different.

What is this thing called voice? Is it style? Is it substance? This voice, this voice is about style. Voice is style, Voice is syntax, Voice is Grammar.

Some say that voice is content, but when you look at it in a different manner (not necessarily through a looking glass) you can see that it is comprised of style. The words are what give voice the unique twist – much like an actor. Of course voice changes quickly (this is a reason that beginning writers have trouble establishing voice, they use more than one). It is easy to say that voice is style (word choice), syntax (word order), and grammar (punctuation).

I wonder what voice is? When I write my papers it is easy to see that my voice can change quickly but I still say the same thing. I see voice as style, syntax, and grammar.

Take a look at these examples. Isn’t it remarkable that you can see three distinct people all saying the same thing? The first voice presented is a Captain Kirkish character. He has short sentences that are choppy and asks rhetorical questions. The second voice loves to talk. This is evident by the way he keeps adding on to his sentences with parenthesis and hyphens. The third voice is personal. He uses the pronoun I, which gives the reader a connection with him. Writers use many ways to establish and maintain voice. Think of them as voice rules. The major ones that I have encountered are word choice, word order, and grammar.

Allow me now to devote a paragraph explaining each part of voice. First we have word choice, or in other words, vocabulary. Certain words belong in the same category. Here are some examples:

            however, therefore, due to this, since

            society, human race, collective, aesthetic, nominal

            totally, wacked, dirty, okay, gots

Each of these groups of words have a different voice. There are many words that overlap into different voices, but when you have a voice but throw in a word to make everything lucid, but doesn’t fit the vocabulary, you wonder who is talking now.

Then there is word order. The example most recognizable is the phrase “Do or do not, there is no try.” The great master Yoda often mixed up his word order giving a distinct voice. Can you imagine him saying “Since there is not trying; do it or don’t.” At the beginning of the sentence, I place many modifiers to establish my personal voice. As you change word order you create a new voice.

 Lastly there is grammar. Isn’t it weird when all of a sudden the author uses a semicolon; highlighting a phrase in the sentence? Then this writer has the nerve to never use a semicolon again? What if there were many questions? If they came often? You couldn’t get away? What is in the author’s mind? Why does he torment you? Or never use a comma and keep talking and talking and talking when you have a run on sentence and it is annoying and hard to follow but this has been used to create a distinct impression of rambling for the reader. Grammar is important in establishing and maintaining voice.

So there are all these traits and qualities in voice. The trick to establishing voice and keeping it is to have rules. Think of a set of rules for the voice you use and stick to them. The easiest way to establish a voice is for the reader to notice consistency in the voice. When voice is no longer consistent the reader gets confused. To create unique voices of my own, I use about three rules total. These rules could all be about word choice in a paper, or a rule from each of the categories I mentioned. But to be effective you need to be consistent. This is what voice is: consistency in style, syntax, and grammar.

In imitating Frankfurt and performing a bit of a study in the development of this paper (the study was rather humorous; in that for a rough draft I used different voices in a comical fashion to see if my peers could recognize the voice) I learned a lot about voice. If I want my voice, I write what I think. Every once in a while I will catch myself breaking a voice rule, and rewrite something because it isn’t in the voice I use. My voice consists of starting with modifiers. Not only will I explain a rhetorical concept in my writing, I use the concept as I write it. Sarcasm is a staple as I write. A trick that I use to create voice which cannot be done by all (purely due to individual differences) is that I imagine the person speaking. If I want a pompous jerk then I imagine a pompous jerk speaking to me and write what he says. I’ve learned that unless there is a break or sudden change in the way the words appears on the paper, it is difficult to recognize that there are different voices. I tried to place three voices together in the same paragraph, but alas, it didn’t work out. I learned from reading other’s work that when voice is lost it is because they were not consistent in their writing. I had a lot of fun using different voices.

Another thing dawned upon me as I was writing this paper. A humorous trick that humorists will use is to give an established voice, say a kid, and then have it break character suddenly. For example:

So I was, like reading a magazine. And there was this totally hot guy drinking some beer. He was surrounded by all these chicks who most likely had surgery done on them. Anyway, it totally hit me why they like made this ad. You see, when guys see this, they totally have, like, a chemical reaction in their pituitary gland. This gland like releases a bunch of hormones and these hormones cause tachycardia and make the dude like feel good. Well, his brain doesn’t realize that the chicks are making him hot and so his brain thinks “Wow, check out that beer, I like it.” how stupid is to think that, you know?

Since much humor is based on surprise, breaking one of your voice rules will have a positive effect on your target audience. Man I do love voice.