While the "voice agnostics" are right in pointing to the need for a little more light and a little less heat in defining voice, energies should be focused upon providing a context for students' discoveries about how voice functions and is attained in writing. In the Story Workshop approach to writing instruction the elements from which everything else builds for the writer are seeing and voice, both of which, working together, generate and organize movement. Three principles underlie the Story Workshop emphasis upon voice and guide the specific techniques and coachings used by teachers in class: (1) the teacher must accept the students' right to their own language, their cultural background, and their skills level; (2) the class is inherently democratic in that it draws upon capacities most students already possess; and (3) the syllabus takes students through a sequence of writing tasks beginning with familiar basic forms that call forth naturally their own distinct and most often used voices and proceeding through those which place an increasing demand upon more conceptual and analytical capabilities. A story workshop format moves through a series of exercises and activities that build sequentially: opening recall, oral reading of models, recall and comment on oral reading, word exercises, oral telling, in-class writing, oral read-back of in-class writing, oral reading of selections from student work, and final recall. (Seventeen references are appended.) (MS)