Just call me Miss Quotation

A few years ago a colleague got angry when the student newspaper published a fairly innocuous quotation in which my colleague, who has never committed a colloquialism since emerging from the womb, allegedly said that something "needs done."

"I would never say that," she insisted, and she was right but I didn't see the point in having hysterics about such a small thing--until a hack misquoted me as saying that a certain software system provides a convenient method of "distributing information out."

I would never say that! The phrase is so ugly it's polluting my page! It doesn't even sound like me! (I hope!)

But that raises the question: what do I sound like? This week I'll introduce my creative nonfiction students to voice, tone, and lyricism, elements of style that defy easy definition. We all have distinctive voices and sometimes like to play with other voices, but how do we pin down just what we mean by "voice"? We can speak with a high pitch or an angry tone or a playful mood, but how do we translate those voices to the written word without resorting to emoticons?

Word choice plays a part but it's not everything. Here is a word cloud formed from my recent blog posts. I see that I've been writing about my daughter and water and readers and the calming autumn colors suggest a peaceful walk through the woods, but the same word cloud could have been generated if I'd written a shrill rant about first wanting my daughter to drown readers in water and then going back to impact students with balloons.


But I wouldn't write that. The words are mine, but voice is made up of far more than just words. The question is, how do I communicate the concept of voice to people who think it would be perfectly normal for me to say "distribute information out"?