Expression on its own, even passionate self-expression, is not an art. A shout expresses; it does not yet say; it may have some contextual significance but it does not have meaning in the proper sense. A style can be vivid and still fail to express, to assert, or to move a listener toward what we want him to see to be true. Eagerness and passion are not an argument and not persuasive in itself. Passion, in itself, is actually nothing more than feeling, since passion must have something that we are passionate about in order to have meaning and direction. The student who has been told to “be himself” and speak in his own voice may produce a recognizable tone, may even say something enjoyable to hear or troubling, and still not have said anything that another person could clearly agree with, deny, or obey.
When “find your voice” or “express yourself” is something we do before we take adequate care of our words, the student ends up being asked to be interesting before he can even be clear and to be sincere before he can be responsible for asserting or denying a claim. Authenticity then is just something a hearer either feels in response to us as a person or not; if he does not feel it, we can scarcely force him to; and this results in the breakdown of discourse, since our views and perspectives on things become more a matter of personal response to someone else and not as much concerned with truth. If the only test of speech is that it came from you, then no hearer can ever say you were wrong, unclear, or unjust — only that you were not you, which is a hard charge to sustain and even making it sometimes feels disrespectful.
The problems in these cases occur as much for the listener or reader as for the speaker or writer. If you genuinely do not know what another person is trying to say, that can sometimes be your fault; but it is also incumbent upon the speaker, as he is the one with something to say, to make sure that others are able to hear it. Speech is ultimately public. A promise, a prayer, an argument, a verdict, a diagnosis: these are acts which require someone else to know what was said. A community that cannot tell what was promised, prayed, argued, or enacted is not a community. It is a clamor of passions and feelings that happen to be personal.
The speaker will have trouble too, if he only cares for his own voice and expression. A voice that cannot name, assert, or follow or give an argument will not get stronger by being left alone. It will only get more used to being unanswerable and that means it will become less and less able to persuade and so less and less powerful.