Whose voice is on the recording?

Text: an original contemporary feature-style practice extract.

The first recording sounded wonderfully clear. A woman described the street where she had grown up, and every word reached us without a cough, a pause or the scrape of a chair. The editor smiled. Then the woman asked where her hesitation had gone.

She had stopped before naming a neighbour because she was unsure whether she remembered him fairly. Removing the pause made the answer quicker, but it also made it sound certain. We played the unedited version. Between two ordinary sentences sat five seconds of thought. They were not empty. The woman laughed at the chair scrape and asked us to remove that instead. She was not insisting that every noise deserved preservation; she wanted the uncertainty to remain attached to the words it had interrupted.

The final recording was shorter than the original and less smooth than the first edit. It kept the hesitation. When we wrote the description for the archive, we called it an interview rather than a statement. That small choice could not solve every question about memory, but it admitted that a voice on a recording belongs to someone thinking, not merely to a file that has been cleaned.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to interest and engage the reader.

In your answer, consider:

• language features and techniques
• structural techniques
• the effect on the reader.

Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.