Chapter 9

1. Chapter 9 Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice

2. 9: Your Own Voice • Myth: academic writing must always be serious and formal • Problem: students feel trapped • Reality: Academic Writing should be relaxed, easy to follow and fun • Solution: draw on expressions of everyday conversation • Enliven, but also enhance precision and rigor

3. 9: Your Own Voice • Mix Academic and Colloquial Styles (blend) • Read the following example: • What's formal? • What's informal? • What's the effect?

4. 9: Your Own Voice • Example 1Marking and judging formal and mechanical errors in student papers is one area in which composition studies seems to have a multiple-personality disor­der. On the one hand, our mellow, student-centered, process-based selves tend to condemn marking formal errors at all. Doing it represents the Bad Old Days. Ms. Fidditch and Mr. Flutesnoot with sharpened red pencils, spill­ing innocent blood across the page. Useless detail work. Inhumane, perfec­tionist standards, making our students feel stupid, wrong, trivial, misun­derstood. Joseph Williams has pointed out how arbitrary and context-bound our judgments of formal error are. And certainly our noting of errors on stu­dent papers gives no one any great joy; as Peter Elbow says, English is most often associated either with grammar or with high literature—"two things designed to make folks feel most out of it.“ - "Frequency of Formal Errors in CurrentCollege Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research" byRobert J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsfbrd

5. 9: Your Own Voice • Example 2 "The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full blown to Colorado Springs - the strange, creative energy that crops up where the future's consciously made, where people walk the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase." • Adds liveliness and imagination

6. 9: Your Own Voice • Example 3 "As Merill Skaggs put it, 'She is neurotically controlling and self-conscious about her work, but she knows at all points what she is doing. Above all else she is self-conscious.'         Without question, Willa Cather was a control freak“ • Translate from one language to another (underscore a point)

7. 9: Your Own Voice • Dress Down your language • Euphemism • Ex. Failed to notice -- flew under the radar unaware -- out to lunch

8. 9: Your Own Voice • Make a political statement • 1. Using colloquial spellings/vocabulary/idioms (see MARK TWAIN) "In Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamental vehicle for gittinovuh. That tradition preserves the Afro-American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race.Blacks are quick to ridicule “educated fools,” people who done gone to school and read all dem books and still don’t know nothin!...it is a socially approved verbal strategy for black rappers to talk about how bad they is.“ —GENEVA SMITHERMAN, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America

9. 9: Your Own Voice • Make a political statement • 2. Using words from other languages "From this racial ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollination, an 'alien' consciousness is presently in the making - a new mestiza consciousness, unaconciencia de mujer." -Gloria Anzaldua mestiza: half-breed, crossbreed unaconciencia de mujer: awareness of women • Her point is the suppression of the language

10. 9: Your Own Voice • Beware! • Know your context/audience • When might you NOT want to blend styles? • When might it be effective?

11. 9: Your Own Voice • Recap:  1. A complete divorce from your own writing voice is a thing of the past.  2. Use a mix of colloquialisms and formal language to achieve a style that is your own, but is still rhetorically effective and perhaps even makes a statement of its own.  3. ALWAYS keep in mind your audience in purpose. Ask yourself, "Is this clear? Is it appropriate for the setting? Does it have the effect I want?"