Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice

/0 Comments/in /by

What’s heartbreaking about the trend for destructive speech patterns is that yours is the most transformational generation – you’re disowning your power.

This article is from theguardian.com by Naomi Wolf

vocal-fryPatriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in the form of Internalisation B, making sure they don’t get too far too fast. The latest example: the most empowered generation of women ever – today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain – is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices. Read more →

Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author’s brain

/0 Comments/in /by

This article is from theguardian.com by Richard Lea.

thinkingThe novelist Kamila Shamsie measures out her life as an author in chapters, punctuated by a familiar ritual.

“Usually at the end of writing every chapter I’ll print out and read aloud,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing since university, she continues, citing the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who told her “there are things the ears pick up which the eyes don’t”. As she sits on the lookout for repeated words, unexpected clunks or unwanted dissonances, it “feels like listening”.

“I don’t know how to say that any better. It’s about the sound of the sentences.” After years of “developing your ear for the sounds of language” she doesn’t have to think about “why a particular clump of syllables sounds wrong to my ear. I just know that it does.” Read more →