bval1988

2nd Paper Final Draft

Beatriz Valdez

WC 1304

Final Draft

Can You Hear My Voice?

                The strength of a paper, the soul of a person can be found in the content of the person’s words. The way a person chooses their words and how they can make each word fit like a block is a reflection of his or her voice. For example, I can write, “I love my boyfriend.” Now, I can take that same sentence and inject it with so much of my own personality without changing the meaning of the sentence, “I am completely enamored by this person that I call my own.” How simple it is to inject some personality by adding a few words into a blah sentence.

However, even though it is so easy to add personality to a paper, is it acceptable to keep voice, otherwise known as content, in an academic setting? In other words, is it okay to write with everyday words, slang, and chatter and still call it “academic writing”? In my opinion, I believe that voice is everyday words, slang, and chatter. In other words, voice is content.

I love writing with my heart, but I find that I have to write with my head in order to be accepted into the world of the university, academia. There are very few professors that will allow a student to write with his or her heart, and those professors that do allow this insanity do so because they understand that a student that writes as hoity toity as possible, ends up sounding like a complete tool. The reason for this toolery is because they don’t have as much voice, and they probably aren’t as comfortable when they are trying to write with foreign words. Even one of my professors finally admitted to the class that it’s okay to write however they felt comfortable, “C’mon guys, I know it’s hard enough to write a paper, so just write how you naturally speak and you’ll see that it’ll sound fine…yeesh.” He realized that it is unnerving to throw in words like, “he contends,” “I assembled an essay in hopes of discovering blah, blah, blah…” when it’s not the natural way a student talks.  However, it is so difficult to find the professor that will allow this sort of debauchery.

                People never really give thought to how voice (content) affects writing. In terms of voice, Frankfurt and I are on completely opposite sides. His voice comes across as stiff, analytical, and scholarly, and my writing is playful, flexible, and conversational.  Now, to demonstrate how my voice will affect his writing, I will attempt to imitate a passage by Frankfurt’s essay, “On Truth”. This essay was written with a strong sense of academia and hopefully, it’ll be dismantled, muah-haha.

                So, if a person that feels giddy realizes that the giddiness is the result of some outside force-that is, a something or someone that the person realizes he or she can live without due to the fact that their giddiness depends on that someone or something AND that they owe their happiness to that someone or something. Spinoza believes that the person cannot help but love that outside force. This is what Spinoza understands love to be: the way we react to and perceive that someone or something that causes our happiness. According to Spinoza, people can’t help but love what makes them feel good. Also, they love what they think will make them complete, whole, and help them navigate through their existence.

 It seems to me that Spinoza has the right idea going on here. There are many examples that follow the typical formula that Spinoza lays out: people tend to love what makes them “whole”, “complete”, and “helps them live their life in complete happiness” without changing their basic needs and wants. Another thing that Spinoza notes is that when people love, they want to hold on to that thing and make sure it never goes away. The thing that a person loves is so dear to him because his happiness and his very character are dependent on that thing and, that’s why a person will strive to shelter and make sure that the sources of his happiness are indispensable to him.

                So in copying this passage, I learned a few things: I totally killed the authoritative voice in the essay, and (in my case) it is not possible to keep voice in an academic setting. Honestly, I feel as though I demolished the authority of the author. By using everyday words such as “giddy” and “right idea going on” , I made it accessible to the general public. As we all know, the world of academia does not open its doors to everyday Joe’s. Even though I bashed the use of more “traditional” words and phrases in an academic paper by replacing them with everyday language, I can’t help but feel as though I NEED them to survive in the world of the academic. Yes, I may sound like a total tool in using the “traditional” words or phrases, but by gum, it makes me sound like I fit with the crowd that I’m supposed to be impressing. When I use phrases that are familiar to me, they sound foreign to the trained and sophisticated ear of the academic. When I use my home-grown phrases, such as “tool”, “hoity-toity” and “giddy”, I kill any authority on whatever subject I present. When I use the sounds, languages, and noises that roll off of my uncouth tongue, I cannot be accepted into the world of the educated, prestigious, and elite. The elite only want the sound of academia; the sound of people trained in a traditional setting using the traditional language of the elite (which is not the language people in everyday conversation use).

                Another thing that I learned is that even though it is hard to keep voice in an academic setting, it is not impossible. To keep voice in an academic setting, the best thing to do is to tweak the language and tone. One of the things that I struggled with the most was the use of language. Where Frankfurt used, “Many paradigmatic instances,” I used the language that was most familiar to me. Not only was this language familiar to me, but it fit into the blocks that built the pyramid of my writing. My language is the imprint of my essence on this earth, but it is just not welcome sometimes. In writing the imitation exercise, I found that my voice did not work for the piece. Like I said earlier, my relaxed language does not come across as very scholarly, and people tend to give more respect to academic voice. The other thing that I can tweak to have my writing fit the academic setting is the tone that I use. I tend to write in a very friendly and somewhat sarcastic tone and that is not always welcome in the world of the academia. What I’ve learned is that the best tone in an academic setting is the neutral tone. When I am objective and neutral, my writing tends to agree with the norms of the academic setting. In turn, turning off the voice in my paper because it disables the use of everyday language, and that is the biggest contributor to my voice in writing.

                Voice is something that is so profound and revealing because of the content that is found within the writing. Content will unmask the writer behind the pen, and show the world what that writer is made of. This tool that writers use is so useful when it comes to informal papers, but it has to masked when used in the academic setting. If it is left to run wild, the authority will be lost to the author’s voice.