Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries

Peter Elbow, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Abstract

"Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both.