Kate87

Voice (paper 2-draft 1)

Voice and Discourse
When I was asked to define voice, I thought it was a really stupid question. To me, the concept voice has always been so obvious; voice is the way I write, the way I express myself through word choice and sentence structure. I could even wrap my head around the idea that voice would be a matter of content or opinion, because through my academic career I have written papers, assignments that have required me to go against all personal opinions, with my own voice.
There are several variations of my voice that exist in different discourses that I participate in.  When writing a paper on mass genocide, I would express my voice in a somber compassionate way, not one that includes fowl humor and sarcasm. Just the same, when I write responses on political campaigns I know that I can inflict as much sarcasm and criticisms as I feel necessary, because, let’s be honest, most politicians are just looking to be made fun of.
It is important to know that voice has many parts, just like a personality has many parts and is subject to change at any given moment.
With this being said, your voice is always your own and it is impossible to get rid of it.  To show this I will do an imitation on Frankfurt, where I will use his ideas on global communications of truth and inflict my own voice.
No society can allow itself to ignore the truth.  A society must do more that just recognize that truth and lies exist, which is important but not the only step.  This society must also encourage leaders to explore greater truths. It must encourage all those capable of finding truth to spread it, and to put a stop to the acceptance of bullshit. The only way for society to become civil is for people to acknowledge that facts are facts for a reason and that by ignoring them for personal reasons is just selfish and holds back the entire society.  If we have every civilization believing only their societies truths there is no way that every society will be able to get along. The only way for this unification will for each civilization to acknowledge a universal set of facts and truths. A set of truths that is widespread and vast.
After completing this exercise, I found it was harder than I expected to use only my voice, and not include Frankfurt’s voice. I believe this is because I didn’t feel strongly enough about the topic to place my voice inside of Frankfurt’s message. It was also hard because I know that Frankfurt used his voice in a very specific way to convey a very specific message, and I fear that I may have completely mangled said message. I chose to use smaller and often more comprehensible words where Frankfurt specifically used phrases uncommon to most like “attitude that is inherently antithetical to a decent and orderly social life” (33.)
Frankfurt’s word choice, or voice, allowed him to reach an academic audience that already has a knowledge base that informs them that, a society based on opposing viewpoints will only lead to the diminishing of social order.
I felt like I did not do justice to Frankfurt in my imitation because I found my self leaving out ideas or shifting them even slightly to make the piece my own. Frankfurt says, “ A society that is recklessly and persistently remiss in any of these ways is bound to decline or at least to render itself culturally inert;” which I ignored because I was not sure how to write in any better way than what Frankfurt already had.
.My struggle with this exercise has made me believe that voice canot be simply style. My stlye is not as vividly expressed when I am discussing something I do not have strong feelings for. With this in mind, if you start me on a topic that sparks an intrest in me, my writing will become extremely passionate and I tend to ramble and use run on sentences with commas all over the place. Still I cannot believe taht style is not a part of your voice. There has to be some importance on the way a perosn uses syntax and sentence structure, the way a perosn puts words to use in a sentece. As far as I am concerned, there is not a single answer, people far smater than me have argued for years on this topic and still have not found an answer... So voice is opinon and style.