Almost 30 years ago I read an article about voice. The author, Carl Leggo, had 100 questions about voice.

Then in February I attended a webinar by Candy Fleming in which she talked about voice and persona and crafting your persona/voice until it was clearly yours no matter what you wrote.

I have used the 100 questions about voice in my college rhetoric classes and went looking to see if I still had them. I did!

I am going to list just a few of them here for your perusal–and so that I will think about them.

7. How is voice determined and influenced by the writer’s choice of diction, form, organization, shape, and typography? How is voice related to the texture of language use like brushwork in painting?

13. Why do I experience an insatiable and irrepressible need and desire to voice experience, to give voice(s) to experience, to experience voice(s)?

27. Is the tentative, probing voice of questions underrated while the more assured, declarative voice of statements is overrated? Or vice versa?

30. Why do the business writer, the technical writer, the academic writer, the bureaucratic writer, the children’s writer, the romance writer, the theological writer, the newsmagazine writer often have different voices? Where do they find their voices?

questions were excerpted from:

Leggo, Carl. “Questions I Need to Ask Before I Advise My Students to Write in Their Own Voices.” Rhetoric Review 10.1 (Fall 1991): 143-152.