voice

Definition:

(1) The quality of a verb that indicates whether its subject acts (active voice) or is acted upon (passive voice).
(2) The distinctive style or manner of expression of an author or narrator. See also:

• Persona
• Trust the Voice

Etymology:

From the Latin, "call"

Examples of Definition #1:

Active Voice


• "If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough."
  (Mario Andretti)


Passive Voice


• "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
  (Charles Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)



• "Honest businessmen should be protected from the unscrupulous consumer."
  (Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia)


Active and Passive Voice

"I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say 'The bullet has been dodged.'"
(George W. Bush)

Observations on Definition #2:

• "Voice is the sum of all strategies used by the author to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page."
  (Don Fry, quoted by Roy P. Clark, Writing Tools, 2006)



• "One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call 'voice.' . . . Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the 'voice.' There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice."
  (Louis Menand, "Bad Comma," The New Yorker, June 28, 2004)

Pronunciation: vois