He begins by explaining that we have created an either/or battle; we can either look through a voice lens or a text lens.
- Text lens: “highlights how discourse issues from other discourse (seeing all texts as ‘intertextual’”)…highlights the visual and special features of language and emphasizes language as an abstract, universal system…calls attention to the commonalities between one person’s discourse and those of others and of culture” (xiv).
- Voice lens: “highlights how discourse issues from individual persons and from physical bodies…highlights sound and hearing, rather than vision, and it emphasizes the way all linguistic meaning moves historically through time rather than existing simultaneously in space…calls attention to the differences from one person to another” (xiv).
Five meanings of voice:
- Audible voice or intonation (the sounds in a text): We automatically “project” a voice into a text because “most people have spoken longer and more comfortably than they have written, and…speaking has more channels of meaning than reading” (xxiv).
- Dramatic voice (the character or implied author in a text): “[W]e do tend to read a human quality or characteristic into a voice” (xxviii).
- Recognizable or distinct voice: “[W]riting is behavior, and it’s hard for humans to engage in any behavior repeatedly without developing a habitual and thus recognizable way of doing it: a style” (xxx –xxxi).
- Voice with authority: “whether a text shows a writer having or taking the authority to speak out: whether the writer displays the conviction or the self-trust or gumption to make her voice heard” (xxxii).
- Resonant voice or presence: “the sound of more of a person behind the words” (xxxv). A writer being him/her self (or not) in their writing
Elbow argues that 1-4 can be analyzed without linking the text to the author. However, resonant voice requires the reader to make links between the text and the rhetor.
* “Most of us are unconscious of how deeply our culture’s version of literacy has involved a decision to keep voice out of writing, to maximize the difference between speech and writing…The culture of school and literacy seem to work against out tendency to write as we speak or to hear sounds in a text” (xxv-xxvi).