A couple of quick replies before I hit the hay...

First, is there any difference b/w voice and the illusion of voice? That's a little flip, I know, but I think sound. What is voice other than a reader's projection onto a text? And I say that as someone who believes, mistakenly or not, that most of I write sounds different from most of what I read, even as I know that I must be projecting...

Second, and less flippy, is that you have a little bit of time to decide whether or not you want to focus on blogs for the diss. You have less time if what you decide to do is focus on their use in the classroom--it's a more heavily articulated research tradition you'll be entering in that case, with particular modes of research and rules of evidence, ones that (imho) require a little more advanced planning.

Drop me a note if you want to talk/email/IM on this a little more (and that's an offer rather than a statement...heh).

cgb

yeah, I'm a little divided here, and you're asking me to better articulate what I'm still working out: I guess I make the mistake here of conflating "voice" with "personality."

Certainly the *sound* or imagined sound of a voice reading adds to a text. But I'm also talking about a personality--a sense of who a writer is. Someone somewhere was doing these horrible word-counting and sentence-measuring studies, and even though I'm highly skeptical of such quantitative work, I'm also wondering if this is what I'm talking about.

It's also what we see in handbooks and readers: things like sentence variety, a particular level of detail and example, *making it important to the reader*. So much of what I had to read for, say, 601, was nearly void of personality. Like, I had no sense, as I read (and I'm loathe to offer a for instance b/c I don't want to hand out indictments) of *who* the writers were.

And I think what I'm concerned about is the academic writing, as a genre, ignores who the writer is. There are people working against this--mostly third wave academic feminism people. But still, the more a writer can hide herself, the more the writer appears to be a faceless, body-less brain-computer who is unmoved by internal motivations or inclinations, the more ____ (credible?) she is.

Anyway, all this means is I have to read Burke *again,* b/c I'm sure he can (make it all better!!) put into perspective things like writer-motives and responsibility of identification (it's with the reader, I bet--in fact, didn't I argue that in an essay once?). I probably should read Davis again, to, since the first time through I rushed so much that I can't even remember anything except that I envied her writing.

My own wrangling with this stems from a certain liberation that comes with writing, having it read, having it be (quasi-)important (ie getting some work done), and having it be a pleasant "real-to-me" experience.

I don't know. I'm getting out of hand with the personal thing, but it ties in heavily with another thread I'm teasing concerning the illusion of public/private (an illusion particularly difficult for the mom entertain/maintain).

Further, I'm trying not to sound too soft (though I fear I'm not succeeding), in that I'm hypersensitive about your take on the divide between simply "caring" about things/issues/(people) and doing actual work. Either way, this has been a huge help, and I would write more if I didn't have a kid grabbing the keyboard, screaming.

Thanks for being the sounding board. :)

I'm gonna shift this over to email (in fact I already have), but I wanted to note here that I think there's a crucial difference between personality or voice as a property of text (which is pretty arguable) and some like that as a result of social interaction.

Maybe it's an immediacy of audience issue. It can be tough to invoke an audience in academic writing whereas it's easy in the blogosphere and there are ways to do it (trackbacks, e.g.) that don't have analogs in academia.

Oops. Here I am splitting the conversation. I'll save my other thoughts for later...