I was actually excited to read this piece. I thought this was going to be some sort of guide on how to discover and develop ones voice as a writer. I was a little disappointed to find out that was not the case. Personally, I was never really sure if I had a distinct writing voice. I never saw my writing as something that stood out or gave light to who I was as a person, but maybe that is something for the reader to decide and not me. Elbows piece goes on to discuss the arguments around writing in voice and how it is not exactly talked about as much anymore.

What I found interesting and useful was the “Reasons for Attending to Voice in Texts” section. It made me think about my students in my own classroom. Elbow says, “With practice, people can learn to write prose that ‘has a voice’ or ‘sounds like a person’, and , interestingly, when they do, their language-or when we hear a difficult text read aloud well- we don`t have to work so hard to understand the meaning”(176). My students always ask for me to do the class reading aloud or sometimes to even listen to an audio of what are we reading that day. I thought they preferred this because they just wanted to be lazy, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s genuinely easier for some of them to grasp the meaning by hearing a voice read it aloud.