Art of Persuasion

2nd Paper Final Draft

Noél Wees

Dr. Allen

Art of Persuasion

October 13, 2008

Combination of Voice

“I can’t hear you because the voices in my head won’t stop yelling.”  I have seen this bizarre phrase in white lettering on black t-shirts that some odd, high school students decided to wear.  Well, I am actually more interested in discussing the “voice in writing.”  Voice is the style of writing not the substance.  Voice is individualistic, and writers have individualistic ways in presenting ideas.  In academic writing especially, the content of a student’s paper may not be what he or she wants to discuss and address.  The students are forced to choose content within the allotted topics.  More specifically, academic research writing has even more restrictive standards on the students thus narrowing the options for content.  When the goal of the paper is to present research findings (i.e. historical or scientific), the students must present factual information untainted from their convictions; and the students will be unable to assert his or her belief system in correlation to content of the paper.  (I do not dislike the institution’s methods; I am just presenting how it is.) 

The paper’s content is what teachers’ grade.  The content will need to tackle the topic and maintain focus of the subject matter, which will help avoid the promotion of the student’s inner voice overflowing in beliefs.  Prohibiting this overflow of beliefs may be perceived as positive since the student will focus more on logical argument than their personal opinion that the reader, the grading teaching, might not agree with.  Then, the teacher will hopefully be able to objectively grade the writer based on the presented argument instead evaluating values.  Unfortunately, there have been reoccurring situations in which the authoritative teachers award lowly, reduced grades for content that disagreed with the teachers’ ideologies.  In repercussion, the students are not permitted the freedom to explore content in terms true to their conviction. 

So what scraps of creative fabric are students rationed in respect to voice?  Students got last night’s dinner leftovers taste of style. Style permits humor, playfulness, genuineness, seriousness, and many other nouns that contribute to the writing’s uniqueness; it varies in sentence structure and punctuation in the flow of writing.  The topic does not matter as long as am able to express my personality through style.  I wrote a research paper in eleventh grade about euthanasia, assisted suicide.  I particularly do not agree with euthanasia, but in my essay I argued for it.  It was much easier to write about the benefits of euthanasia than to argue that euthanasia is immoral since people have different moral values.  I found more reasons and research to promote the controversy and had difficulty supporting my morality.  In the end, I got an “A” grade for essay even though it did not match my moral code, but hey, I got the grade I wanted. (I worked the system, and this society is about success and making the grade anyway.) 

To prove the point that I am able to work the education system and effectively present my voice in terms of writing style, I imitated Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Truth.

Individualistic points of view are not the essential deciding factors.  Society’s influence controls the decisions people make similar to those insane religious cults. Political and economical standards are motivating factors as well. The post-modernists thrive on the question of whether a person may solely rely on individualistic beliefs or may a person openly refer to the whirlwind of conflicting and demanding society.

Could the post modernists have asked a question with a more obvious answer?  No matter who does the questioning, the main point is to reach an objective perspective.  For example, an architect and an engineer must achieve objectivity accurately.  Their skills and available resources are used to overcome the difficulties to achieve their plans, which are meticulously measured and constructed.  These carefully designed plans are executed and cannot be dependent on an individual outlook, and these particular plans are not subject to change because of demanding societal law or taboo.  However, a plan’s precision is not enough.  The measurement must be correct under any social condition and from any perspective.

After I participated in this imitation exercise, I have realized some new revelations.  Voice cannot merely be defined as style.  Although style allows the writer the playfulness of different grammatical usage, this grammatical usage is not enough to establish the writer’s authentic voice because the style is in close correlation to subject matter.  It was difficult to play with grammar with the sentences because the sentences’ ideas were not my own.  I did not create the ideas, and I find it much easier to have style in my writing when the content came from my intellect to paper; these foreign ideas are difficult to implement as my own. 

To implement someone else’s ideas as my own is somewhat like a hospital patient that recently underwent a kidney transplant surgery.  The patient’s body is heavily medicated in order for it to accept the unfamiliar organ as its own, and over time the body will hopefully accept the transplant.  Sometimes the transplant is rejected.  Time has an obligation to let kidney, the new ideas or someone else’s ideas, settle in this different body, mind.  The medication figuratively represents the preparation of my mind needing to be ready and open to receive new data.  Then the time expected for the transplant to become apart of a new system correlates to the time I must allow for innovative ideas and content to become apart of my arsenal before I can recycle them out of my mouth to the pen on paper.  The idea of transplant rejection means I disagree with the presented information and decide not to make this information apart of my truth, but given time to understand new influences definitely helps me write with my own voice.

Because subject matter sometimes makes it very difficult to use my voice in terms of style, I have to allot myself time to fully grasp new data to able to regurgitate the idea in my voice (stylistically).  I honestly feel like I lost my voice in imitating a section of Frankfurt’s writing.  I maintained the same content, but put the writing into my own style that particularly fits my personality and did not feel like I showed my own voice (contextually).  It was still Frankfurt’s writing voice, even though the syntax was changed, because I maintained his ideas.  His ideas were not apart of my agenda.  That imitation exercise did not allow much opportunity for my voice to change; it felt like this was an exercise of limitation.  No matter how I view voice, either as the writing’s content or style, the education institution puts some limitation on the academic writing.  Content is restricted on topic choice, and style is confined in the way it is written, formally or informally.  The voice can be restrained and mine was stifled.  If I would have done the imitation exercise by changing the content to fit my own beliefs and feelings on the issue, then I would have felt that my voice would come through more vibrantly.

I originally stated that voice is simply style.  Well, it is much more complex then style.  My own voice’s style did not shine in the imitation exercise of putting Frankfurt’s writing in words.  I felt that the words did not completely broadcast my voice because the ideas were Frankfurt’s.  In order for the ideas to be projected as more authentically mine, I need time to imbed the ideas in my brain.  These ideas and the content within an essay are also what an instructor assesses, and the academic writing may have specific limitations.  My voice was fenced in the restrictions of grammar in the imitation piece.  The voice is not only style but ideas and content.  Content that belongs to the writer is a form of his or her voice in combination to the style.