English 319: Persuasion

2

Paper 2 Final (Words on a Page)

Daniel Mauro
Group 1 paper 2
The Words on a Page
The words found on a page usually dictate whether or not a person is writing for pleasure, to be social or for an assignment, but no matter how they appear on the page, it is the style in which they were used on the page that brings the voice of the writer to life. It is important for the writing to do this—without this occurrence of voice; the paper would be bland and unappealing. The style a person utilizes takes patience and practice to achieve but once that happens it empowers the writing. It is also said that the content of the work gives it voice as well, but I disagree, the content of the paper is simply just that, the content.
The style of your paper is what you bring to it. A change in pacing via commas, semi-colons or even fragmented sentences can give readers a glimpse into the writer’s mind— this can include em dashes as well. Another way to achieve your voice in writing can be to change the grammar or even the syntax of words on the page. Ex. Boopsie kissed a pig. Boopsie embarrassedly kissed the dirty pig. Boopsie, forced into it by her friends, kissed the pig—on the nose of all places! The sentence at the core is the same, but the examples use syntax, grammar and mechanics to change what you read.
You can’t really do these kinds of things with changing the content. In the world of linguistics, content would be considered as morphemes. The smallest unit of language that essentially makes sense. For example the word, overachiever, is comprised of three morphemes: Over, achieve and er. Over being the prefix, achieve is the base, and er working as a suffix. Now when you place your morphemes into a logical order you may end up with syntax—a sentence. The content is used to build your paper, but the way you put the content onto the paper is what makes it yours.
To prove my argument I have imitated a bit of a passage in Harry Frankfurt’s book, On Truth, into a style I would use. Something that is easily read but can hit the point home.

What is true and what is false is based on nothing more, according to post modernists, as being a weight on a person’s point of view. These constraints are forced by the tight requirements of the economy and politics influencing us, in essence, peer pressure of society forces us, as people, what to think. The point made here is very easy, but at the same time, too difficult to understand.
However, using a simple example can debunk the post modernist’s theory. Engineers and architects strive to achieve perfection. They are skilled at using their available resources to combat obstacles that stop them from attaining their goal. Their measurements are crucial to the designs they create and above all else should not shift under the erratic changes that an individual’s perspective implies. Also, for the work to be held under the demands of social norms or the unspoken laws of society could skew results and end up creating something that wasn’t intended. Their measurements must always be correct—perfect to a “tee”—but they must be stable as well.

After imitating Frankfurt’s work I still think that it can be labeled as being very dense. Frankfurt’s piece is very dense with meaning and hard to swallow; in contrast my style of writing can be very light and playful. His content and my style didn’t mix very well. Which helped to uncover a small flaw in my argument, the content on the page isn’t just the body but it plays a small role in developing the voice. The style and content a person uses cohesively create their style, albeit most of the voice still belongs to style.
In the passage, Frankfurt talks about the post modernist’s view on truth and applies a very simple example to it to dispel the logic behind the argument. Basically, truth is user-defined and the experience of our lives changes what we see as truth. What he argues, with the help of an engineer or architect, is that this doesn’t hold true for every group of people. The engineers and architects of the world can never skew their data, they let their tools and methods help shape their ideas and creations, then those creations need to be stable enough to be able to do what they were intended to do. If they let outside ideas overtake their work then that work becomes unstable. That is something I tried to highlight in my imitation, whether I took it out of context or not, I wanted it to be easier for the reader to understand this position on the definition of truth.
Trying to inflict my style onto Frankfurt’s content was very hard; I had to play around with mechanics and word choice, as per normal, then I even needed to simplify most of what he said to fit it into the way I would say it. In order to effectively imitate Frankfurt into my voice, I found that I had to change both the style and content of the piece.
Going back to my previous example of linguistics, I said that the morphemes were the content and everything else was style and that style created the voice of the paper. Something that was made apparent in the imitation writing process was that you could change the content of the piece and in changing the content you could easily change the style. You can change the morpheme’s meaning with simple additions and that makes it easier to change the overall style of the piece.
I gathered from the exercise that in order to create your voice, the content and style of the writing need to make sense, and can’t drastically differ from each other. In order to bond the imitation together I first had to make Frankfurt’s content simpler—something you could easily read and find the meaning to without much strain, after that it became very easy to inject my style into the piece. It was like cutting a piece of steak into little bite sized pieces, then adding steak sauce onto them. However, I still believe that the voice of a paper is the style in which it was written, the content still plays a part and essentially dictates the style of the piece.