Voice: Who is talking to and through you?

What are we talking about when we are talking about voice? Perhaps, we are talking about written discourses which demonstrate the views, values, and beliefs of a person so overly and assertively as to individuate him from others. Explicitly, this definition necessitates that the person separates, if not segregates, him from others to situate himself in a unique position of identity. I argue that is definition of voice is qualified as Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) contends that writing is in some sense displaced and deficient speech. An extension to this argument presupposes that the projection of a personal voice through writing is partial, and, as such, writing both hides and obfuscates the person who is producing those written artifacts. This is, of course, not to mean that written discourses are characterized by their inability to represent voice. Voice is, in fact, what most people have in their speech, not in their writing (Ivanic and Camps, 2000).
And the reasons are obvious. Unlike speech, writing lacks both the phonetic and prosodic qualities of a language. Besides, some other components of language like gesture, posture, body movement, proximity, distance, and, above all, semiotics cannot be drawn upon as people write. As a result, writing essentially does not allow as much freedom of expression as does speech. It comes as no surprise, then, national, geographic, and social identity is often erased when people write (Ivanic and Camps, 2000). Then, I submit what is the rationale of academic endeavor to discover students’ voice from their written artifacts. As well as, voice is a cultural constructs which means different things to different cultures. Some oriental cultures believe that the suppression of individual voice and the endorsement of collective wisdom is written discourses is the normative imperative of academic endeavor, while the West emphasizes the strong expression of individual voice in written discourses. Given this varying concept of voice across cultures, the following question is of crucial importance:

· In a multilingual and multiethnic country like the U.S. what is the appropriate pedagogical approach to teach and study writing which will ensure the intellectual growth of students alike while embracing and incorporating the cultural notion of voice?