Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition

4. Distinction: From Voice to Footing

56 4 Distinction: From Voice to Footing How to make your style more readable, how to meet your reader’s expectations , how to create a clear and lucid style . . . all such how-to approaches to style fail to account for a certain something that the word style usually communicates to those in the know—the sense of distinction that style conveys, the way a writer can create an impression of self-inlanguage . It often goes by the name of “voice,” a possibility we consider in thischapterbutultimatelysetasidein favorof adifferentmetaphor fromthe field of performance studies. We call the revised notion “stylistic footing.” The main advantage we argue for footing over voice is that it better communicates the idea that style is always a matter of agreement (or disagreement ) between an author and audience, two social entities that stand in some relationship to each other. To use terms we introduced in chapter 2, the switch from voice to footing involves a change in motive from one focused on the writer alone (distinctive self) to one that relates writer to reader (writer -reader interaction). The socialization of style implied in the concept of footing also picks up the idea from chapter 3 that conventions and deviations in language create and break the expectations of readers who alternately seek both comfort and surprise from the authors with whom they engage. Distinction as Voice Distinction is considered a characteristic of the best writing. It comprises the set of traits or the overall character—the deviations from a norm—by +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 Distinction: From Voice to Footing / 57 which a writer’s work distinguishes that writer from others. The notion is usually applied to literary artists of high regard. We hear of Emily Dickinson ’s riddling elliptical style; Mark Twain’s informal, colloquial style; Ernest Hemingway’s telegraphic, understated style; William Faulkner’s long and winding sentences. But writers of nonfiction are also praised or blamed for a luxuriant style, a hard-hitting style, a deadpan style, or an engaging style, as if style were an outgrowth of their personal character. And that kind of distinction from the masses is just what the concept of “voice” captures. As physical voice is literally an expression of an individual body—so distinctive that, like fingerprints or DNA evidence, it can be used to identify the speaker—so style, the concept implies, is an outgrowth of the author’s character, a virtual fingerprint on the body of an author’s work (his or her “corpus,” or body of work). “Finding your voice as a writer” is a topic of great concern in dozens of courses on writing. “You’ve found your voice!” is a sentence of great praise from composition and creative writing teachers alike. But what does it mean? Too often it means little more than “I like it!” In other words, such references to voice can be a cop-out on the part of the teacher. Voice is natural (“It can’t be taught”). It’s something you have to find (“I can’t teach it to you”). It is supposed to emerge from your hands as naturally as your spoken voice emerges from your lungs and larynx and tongue. No doubt, most distinctive styles actually do emerge without a teacher’s intervention—though hardly so “naturally” as the cry of a voice at a baby’s birth—but we would hope that teachers might be able to show a path to achieving distinction rather than merely saying, “Keep practicing , and I’ll tell you when you get there.” But there’s another possibility. “Voice” in writing sometimes refers to the actual intersection of writing and speaking, between literacy and orality . Now here’s a place we can go and make a study. Focusing a student’s attention on the difference between habits of speech and habits of writing , or having people read their writing aloud, can have a dramatic effect on style. A student in a class one of us taught a few years ago—call her Vicky—distinguished herself as the class clown, known for her biting wit and smart-aleck humor. The first papers she wrote for class were stilted and awkward academic exercises, as boring to read as they must have been to write. The teacher invited her to his office and asked her why there was such a difference between her dull and convoluted papers and her in-class talk. “Well I can’t very well write the way I talk...