Ivanic & Camps’ Voices

This is an interesting article, both in the way it is written and in the claims the authors make. What I liked most was that I could not completely agree or disagree with it. Very often I had to say, Yes, but… In the article, voice is defined not in terms of individuality, but rather in terms of person's associating with certain groups and communities (e.g., academic, professional). Voice is seen as not entirely unique; people "draw on the repertoire of voices they have encountered in their experience of participating in genres and discourses" (Ivanic & Camps, 2001, p.6), and the uniqueness is in how they put together these voices. It is like quilting.

I agree that our voice is in any piece of writing, whether we mean it to be there or not, whether we think about it or not, whether we have certain requirements to follow or not. However, I do not think that Ivanic & Camps (2001) provide enough evidence in support of their statement, "All writing contains "voice"" (p.3). They do have markers of ideational, interpersonal, and textual positioning that can be easily found in the Examples they present. Nevertheless, each of the examples can be interpreted in several different ways, depending on what the reader or the authors of the article find more convincing. Ivanic and Camps (2001) not only admit it (the choices can be the result of translating from L1, perceived writing requirements, assignment details, etc.), but they claim it to be insignificant – it does not matter if a writer indeed is militant regarding a certain issue or seeks membership in a certain community. What is important is that the writer is perceived as such because of the lexical and grammatical choices made in the writing. The problem I see here is that every reader will see a different voice in the same writing: what a professor reads in that writing will be different from what a researcher sees there; a monolingual speaker of English will perceive it in a different way than a native speaker of English knowing the writer's L1 or another L2 writer.

I also understand that the authors chose to present their findings in a very particular way of writing. The participants are treated as human beings, not as subjects; and the authors did that deliberately: "out of respect for them as people, we want to examine the extent of their agency in this process of subject-positioning" (Ivanic & Camps, 2001, p.6; text formatting is mine). I think this also shows the intended positioning of the authors themselves towards us, their readers: rather than displaying power by being categorical in their analysis of the data, the authors chose not to provide a variety of possible interpretations for a particular word choice. This shows respect to the readers.

Ivanic, R. & Camps, D. (2001). I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 3 - 33.