Cynthia Selfe
I think students always have within them a range of voices, we don't just have one voice….that if you talk the same in your dorm room that you do in the classrooms you attend you're a very unusual person. Students and teachers both recognize that different kinds of discourse, different kinds of language, different kinds of languages go on in different situations. I would encourage a student to try as many of the voices that they can out on paper, to experiment with voices, to try and call forth voices.

Beverly Moss
We do have to teach students to think about appropriate language, diction, and style for the particular audience and the particular discipline that they happen to be writing. And that may mean that, in sociology, your paper's done this way. Now we may not teach them to write like a sociologist in a first—year writing course, but what we would do is say, "OK, you need to consider what your audience knows. You need to consider what your message is and how you shape that or craft that message. In an appropriate style or tone for that audience."

Megumi Taniguchi
There's surfing talk, there's talk with your friends, there's the way you address a professor.

Geoffrey Philp
For example, I talk in a certain way. I act in a certain way. I'm Professor Philp. I come up here. I'm expected to behave in a certain way, and to a certain extent I can watch myself coming up the elevator, walking through the door and…I am Professor Philp. And when I'm in my mother's house I'm Geoffrey. That to a certain extent is a persona that I create when I go in through her door because there are certain things that Geoffrey Philp or her boy is supposed to do. And the language that you're going to use depends upon the situation that you're in. I'm talking to you like this because we're in an academic situation. But if I were playing dominos with my friends it's a totally different situation…

Mike Rose
The challenge is developing the kinds of linguistic flexibility and skill and fluency that enable us to adapt different writing voices to fulfill different needs in different audiences. Writing the paper for your physics class may require a certain kind of voice or sound that'll be very different if you're writing a short story in a creative writing class which may be yet quite different if you're writing a letter to someone you love deeply.

Chris Lowe
There are lessons to be learned from writing to please your instructor. And that is mainly that you learn to write in a different way, a way that's not normal to you, it doesn't feel comfortable to you. Because one of the most important things in terms of being forced to write essays in school when you don't necessarily like it, is your ability to target a certain audience.