Voice in Student Essays

Abstract

Voice in written language — a metaphorical concept capturing the sense of author identity that comes through when readers interact with texts — has intrigued many writing teachers and researchers. While some teachers regard voice to be an essential feature of good writing, others consider it to be unnecessary, if not distracting, especially in the context of academic and professional writing. One of the most obvious reasons for this discrepancy is the varied conception of voice. In the early years, voice was conceptualized in individualistic terms, focusing on the expression of authentic self (Elbow, 1968; Stewart, 1969, 1972). This perspective has often been at odds with social-constructionist views of voice that emphasize the normative aspects of language use (Cope and Kalantzis, 1993; Hyland, 2008). There are more recent, social-constructivist conceptions of voice that see individual and social voice to be mutually constitutive and inevitable (Ivanič, 1998; Ivanič and Camps, 2001; Matsuda, 2001; Prior, 2001). Studies using a social-constructivist definition of voice (Matsuda, 2001) have shown that voice plays an important role in advanced academic literacy (Matsuda and Tardy, 2007; Tardy and Matsuda, 2009). Yet, as Tardy (this volume) has pointed out, the debate over the notion of voice has tended to be caught in a simplistic individual—social dichotomy.