Voice Analysis

Today, our class's assignment is to analyze a blog for its use of voice. So, we'll be analyzing a transmedia blog I really enjoy for its use of voice. TransmediaMe is a blog by Kyle Stedman, who is interested in writing and transmedia art forms, especially with regards to music and remixes. As someone who is not particularly well-versed in the music world, it's very interesting and enlightening to see this side of Transmedia. Music is just as an important part of the human experience as narrative, and the ways in which transmedia and music intersect are just as varied and creative.

Overall, the voice in each of his posts is very teacherly, but personal. He is an adept educator, but also knows how to reach to an audience of his peers. Through his personal anecdotes and musings, he explores and teaches the bigger concepts that he wishes to share with his readers. This is especially evident in this post, "Wrestling with Authorial Control". A major issue with transmedia and new mediums is this question of authorship and who receives credit and payment under copyright laws. Many transmedia artists wish to be above such an issue, but by sharing with us his own personal grapplings with the mixed feelings that come with creating something and letting others use it, Stedman is able to show why copyright and authorship are such major, complex issues in the first place.

He starts off his post with a fairly confessional stance to illustrate precisely these conflicting feelings as a transmedia remix artists and an academic:

So it’s been interesting in the last few days wrestling with feelings of authorial control that, academically, part of me felt I had somehow transcended. Here’s what happened:

He keeps things colloquial with phrases like "it's been interesting" and "here's what happened" while still discussing a highly intellectual topic such as authorial control. In our class discussions on voice, I've noticed that my peers and I struggle to find such a balance between what is our voice and academic writing, and here in this sentence, Stedman achieves that balance effortlessly.

This particular post even goes into the importance of voice and how it relates to authorship. A frustrating encounter he had with editors of a textbook illustrated how and when he feels the need to extort authorial control and prevent changes and edits added to his writing--it diminishes his voice.

Here’s an example: after telling a story of someone whose Facebook posts made her seem rhetorically unsophisticated, I expressed my frustration at that sort of thing with this section-closing line:

Why study rhetoric? Because so many people so often seem to have no no no idea about how to communicate well.

In context, my hope was for the line to express the emotional level of my frustration, my punctuation-less “no no no” emphasizing the rhythms of speech more than the dictates of “proper” mechanics. But the edited version deleted the story that came before it and used this line instead:

Why study rhetoric? Because, communication is difficult, and even more difficult if we are not rhetorically aware.

Style-wise, the new line (to my ear) lacks the stylistic umph I was going for throughout the piece, and it lacks the rhythms of spoken speech. 

Within this very description of voice, he uses voice techniques such as italics (for the umph, which is also a colloquial onomatopoeia utilized here to create sensory weight to his argument), paranthetical asides, sarcastic "quotation marks" and speech rhythms all to hit home his emotional frustration and the strangeness of the new line. It makes sense that a blog about music, remixes, and writing would pay special attention to the very rhythmic nature of language itself in its rhetoric.

In other posts, he utilizes screenshots of twitter conversations and links to discussions he has had with his peers to highlight the communitarian nature of transmedia. In his post, "Computers and Writing: Communities 2013", he discusses his experience at the 2013 Computers and Writing Convention, referred to throughout the post as cwcon. The post starts with a self reference to this practice of his conference write ups and the ritual he goes through to write these kinds of posts:

Conference wrap-up posts are getting harder for me to write. I open my notes in Evernote, I open the Twitter feed in Tweetdeck, I open the conference website, and I sit there, looking for a theme, wondering what I’ll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years.

I think I’m going to follow the style of my presentation, then: bounce from here to there as memories come, expecting my audience to fill meaning into the gaps. Because, you know, that’s what audiences do anyway.

*

He talks about why writing these posts are important to him, despite difficult: he wonders "what I'll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years" which is speculative, and incredibly intimate. It begs the question, why do we do the things that we do? What will stick with us when all is said and done? This sort of an introspective question in the midst of all these technological methods of keeping up to date remind us that such technologies are at once useful to our memory and not nearly as important as we might think. On one hand, we can jot down and converse with one another on many different topics that seem important in the moment, and through social media and technology we can save these forever, even if we might not be able to recall them to memory swiftly ourselves. On the other hand, we might remember a single even that sticks with us forever, and be surprised to see it not in our notes, or pleased to note that we thought that it was significant enough to write down. It offers a conversations with the past and present and future all at once that is very emotional. That emotion fits incredibly well with the theme of the rest of the post.

Continuing on this quote, he offers us the opportunity to create meaning with him or without him, filling in our own ideas (sort of like I just did with that one "five of fifteen years" comment) on his experience and feelings that might relate back to our own ideas, experiences, and feelings.

The star as a marker indicates that we will have breaks in memory and in communication notes. They are in a way the blanks the audience can fill. Or just plainly, a way to break up what would otherwise be a long wall of text.

He continues this exploration by sharing with us his ultimate question:

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

Again, there is the rhythm of language present in his writing. This sentence is definitely grammatically a run-on sentence. But the building of this feeling of questioning is structurally felt by running-on the sentence. Tension is created through the commas, the multiple questions within one sentence, and utilizing "so" in the beginning, immediately pushing us into a situation.

The quote continues to show another line break, acting almost like a scene break indicating a change of space, time, and a beat in the emotion. After the asterisk, we see the beginnings of the answers to Stedman's question of community and conferences.

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

*

At dinner on Saturday night, Merideth and I talked about Star Trek films along with the other folks at our table. It didn’t take long to realize that we had a shared vocabulary, a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice.

Within this section after the asterisk, he creates an anecdotal and narrative description of community, followed by a colloquial version of the dictionary definition of community: "a shared vocabulary" and then the connotation of community: "a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice." This descriptive passage builds in the audience that feeling in a much more concrete way than one of these sentences alone could have done. An anecdote could have described community well, but it might have alienated those who did not understand this community. An abstract, dictionary definition coupled with a more colloquial connotation would have let us understood how the author felt and the abstract feelings associated with community, but we would have no grounding. Both together properly create a sense of belonging that Stedman is trying to understand, and throughout his posts, his talent with creative writing helps to ground his academic discussion of many abstract concepts associated with transmedia.

For myself, I feel like I can learn a lot from Stedman's style of academic writing. His easy vernacular coupled with key concepts create an environment that does not talk down to the reader. His audience is definitely one who should be somewhat familiar with most of these concepts, but because of his descriptive, intimate, and straight-forward manner, anyone could sit down with these posts and understand easily what he is talking about and trying to convey.

Like my classmates, I've struggled with finding that perfect balance between academic writing and voice driven posts. I've found in writing this blog, some topics lend themselves easily to one, the other, or both. My goal in continuing forth will definitely be to try and blend an academic style with my natural voice more easily, so that all my posts can come across as accessible as Mr. Kyle Stedman's wonderful blog.