If you have ever written a paper, given a speech, composed an email, blogged, or tweeted, you have expressed yourself using your voice. An author’s voice, like your voice, is expressed through the way you say what you are saying. Although the definition of an ‘author’s voice’ is typically described when authors write fiction, each piece of scholarly writing also exhibits a voice. Watch this short video for an emphatic acknowledgement of individual voice:

Your writing style, like your speaking style, consists of components like sentence length, vocabulary, grammar, casual or formal communication, and using (or not using) punctuation. The voice you use when you write may differ depending on your audience and your purpose. An author’s voice is personal and authentic, with each author expressing information in a unique way. As you read a piece of writing, you can detect the author’s voice. Academic voices sound different than the casual voice you would expect to find on someone’s personal blogging website. Beyond the general sound of the author’s voice, it is important to recognize how separated an author is from what he or she is talking about.

Is he writing about his engagement in a first-hand experience, such as playing an instrument?

Is she writing about someone else’s experience, describing characters in a movie she watched the other night?

Being aware of the “degrees of separation” between the author and the experience allows you to think critically about the way information is being presented to you. Recognizing whether a first person account is important for your purposes will shape your search for information. Perhaps you really need a more analytical approach to the topic.

We label sources as primary or secondary, but what seems like a rigid separation can become blurry at times. A resource can be both primary and secondary, and it is your information need that determines where it falls. The proximity of the author to the initial event is an important aspect of the author’s voice.

As you will learn in this challenge, every author has a distinct voice. Copying another person’s voice may be as easy as cutting and pasting, but it can have severe consequences. Choosing to use another person’s writing or voice and passing it off as your own is called plagiarism. You will explore these concepts in more depth in the following quests.

In the Degrees of Separation and Giving Credit quests, you considered two different elements connected to the perspective and authenticity of an author’s writing or, more generally, a creator’s work. To complete this challenge, write a thoughtful, reasoned response to the questions below (this will be in the range of two to four paragraphs). If you would prefer to create something in a format other than a short essay, please feel free to use something other than text as your medium, but include explanation as needed for an audience to understand.

Recently, an Australian poet, Andrew Slattery, who had won a prize for his poem Ransom, had the honor revoked when it was discovered that he had used the work of other poets. Extensively. His poem contained 132 lines, 113 of which were written by others. He defended himself, saying that he was writing in the “cento format,” or collage style. (Rebecca Fitzgibbon, Collage Blurs a Poetic License, Hobart Mercury, September 18, 2013.)

This situation calls into question both aspects of this challenge: using your own voice, and having no degree of separation from a work of creativity. Or does it? Could he have done what he did, and still argue he was using his own voice? And that the poem was indeed his own creation, not a collage of many other poets?