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Voice

Looking back, I realise I spent decades trying to acquire something for which I had no name. Beginning in my teens, I found myself drawn not to answers but to relationships, not to conclusions but to unfolding processes.

Only much later did I understand that what I had been cultivating was a mode of attention. My writing voice was not something I invented. It was something that emerged from that attention. What emerges from my thinking here is a distinction that feels both simple and significant:

Voice is what readers hear. Attention is what produces it.

Perhaps, too: Style can be learned. Voice can be developed. But a mode of attention is cultivated over a lifetime.

I suspect that my development as a writer owed much to skills learned elsewhere. As a motorcyclist, and later as a volunteer RAC examiner, I was trained to observe systematically. Good riders do not merely look. They follow a disciplined process of observation, anticipation and continuous reassessment. Over time I seem to have applied similar disciplines to perception itself. The road became the world. Hazards became questions. Observation became inquiry.

University lecturing taught me another form of attention. I learned to observe not only what students said, but how understanding emerged within them. Often one could sense comprehension taking shape before a student had the words to express it. Teaching required attentiveness to thought in motion, to the subtle interaction between explanation, confusion, recognition and insight.

Social action taught me yet another form of attention. If advanced motorcycling trained me to observe situations and lecturing trained me to observe understanding, social action trained me to observe underlying conditions. It encouraged me to look beyond individual events towards the forces that made them possible. Repeatedly I found that what was visible was only the surface expression of deeper relationships and structures. This habit of looking beneath appearances became part of my writing. It reinforced a tendency to ask not merely what is happening, but what conditions are giving rise to what is happening.

Taken together, these experiences seem less like separate chapters in a life than different expressions of the same discipline. They cultivated habits of watching carefully, tracing relationships, recognising patterns and resisting premature conclusions. If I were to sketch the progression, it might look something like this:

Observation → Systematic Observation → Disciplined Attention → Insight → Voice

The voice comes last. What comes first is the trained capacity to see what others overlook. That capacity was not developed primarily through writing. Writing became the place where the results of that lifelong training found expression.

I was reminded of this some years ago while trying a guitar amplifier in a music shop. Another customer, a landscape gardener in his fifties, recognised my name and struck up a conversation about writing. He told me he wanted to start a blog but had been attending a creative writing course and had come away with the belief that he first needed to acquire a voice.

This took me aback.

Within minutes it was obvious to me that he already had one. He had spent half a century working, observing, thinking, solving problems and making sense of the world. He had a perspective. He had a way of seeing. In short, he had a voice.

What he lacked was not a voice but confidence in it.

He began talking about grammar. I told him to forget grammar for the moment. Write about what you know. Readers will come for your perspective, not your punctuation. Grammar and style can be learned. What mattered was that he had already spent decades cultivating a way of seeing the world. The writing would develop in time.

The encounter stayed with me because it revealed a common misunderstanding. Voice is often treated as though it were a literary technique that must be acquired before one can begin writing. Yet my experience suggests the reverse. Most people acquire a voice through living. They acquire writing through writing.

I do not suggest that every essayist arrives at a voice in this way. This is simply an attempt to understand how my own voice emerged. What continues to deepen it is a subject for another note. Yet the reflection does raise a further question. If my voice emerged from a lifelong mode of attention, what lies behind the voices of other essayists?

I suspect the answer is rarely a matter of style alone. Behind every distinctive voice there may be some equally deep disposition, habit of mind, preoccupation or way of attending to experience. Long before the pen touches paper or the fingers strike the keys, the writer has already spent years, perhaps decades, learning what to notice and what questions cannot be left alone.

Perhaps a mature voice is not something a writer acquires. Perhaps it is what becomes audible when a lifelong way of paying attention finally finds its form.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

This is an ambition for five websites and a short link domain.

Together they publish essays, explore the craft of essay writing, and encourage others to engage in the practice. Each serves a different purpose. Let's start with chat, and get you engaged...

substack.essayism.org Letter From An Essayist. A place for conversation and chat about essayism. On reflection, perhaps not the best title. But for anyone wanting to chat. This is the place to visit. The Chat page for Letter From An Essayist

esy.ie · The Essayist's Notebook. A personal notebook with public access. A place to record thoughts, notions and realisations as they arrive. Fragments, observations and questions. Nothing more. The notebook is already underway, with several new posts appearing each week. The Essayist's Notebook

essayist.ie · Learning the Craft. A record of what I have learned about essay writing. Part reflection, part practical guide, it explores the craft of constructing and delivering essays, and the lessons discovered along the way. Planned launch: before the end of 2026. Bits are already arriving. The Essayist

essays.ie · Essays. A home for essays that do not naturally belong elsewhere. The more reflective pieces. The longer explorations. The essays that sit outside Marshall on Policy, The Marshall Review, and An Activist's Notebook. The foundation essays are already in place; others are slowly maturing. Essays

essayism.org · Exploring Essayism. A publication about reflective writing and the tradition of essaying. It asks what connects essays, essayists and the practice of inquiry through writing. Part definition, part method, part continuing investigation. It provides a home for ideas that sit behind and alongside the other publications. And gives me the opportunity to explore the dispositions and creations of other essayists Essayism

esx.ie – the short domain name that provides the connective tissue between the sites. It starts “es” as all the domain do, and offers “x” as a generic symbol for the remainer of the names. I cannot be held responsible for other peoples perception. The link verification page

Progress

esy.ie: active and growing. essays.ie: foundation collection established. essayist.ie: planned and expected to emerge before 2027. essayism.org : active and growing substack.essayism.org – Launched, but lonely. esx.ie : doing it's job.

Together, the three core sites explore not simply essays as a form of writing, but the essay as a way of thinking. The fourth essayism.org explores the tradition, practice, and purpose of inquiry through writing; and the fifth provides and opportunity for discussion and conversation. David Marshall Sna Sceirí

About David Marshall

David Marshall is a contemporary Irish essayist writing on civic systems, democracy, governance, and the historical role of essayism. He is also recognised as an author, writer, and journalist based in Ireland. His work spans essays, commentary, briefings, civic questions, technology, governance, and contemporary life. In addition to this essay collection, he publishes policy and governance work through other projects. He is the managing editor of essayism.org and the author of An Activist's Notebook. A former university lecturer and political activist with an extensive history in trade union education.

The best policy writing does not corner politicians with gotcha questions.

It changes the terms of the conversation so that simplistic answers become harder to give.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The Israel bonds debate offers a window into one of the central challenges of modern democracy: reconciling legal constraints, moral imperatives and democratic choice.

When I began exploring the efficacy of Amnesty International's petition concerning the sale of Israel Government bonds, I quickly found myself sinking into a quagmire of imperatives, standards, legislation and statutory orders.

Even during the initial research, fact-checking and drafting, the piece expanded from a planned 1,500 words to more than 5,000. Then it became two essays. I split it again, allowing breakout boxes to carry some of the technical detail. Yet it still felt like wading through a bog. And that's something I used to enjoy. So I stopped and let the sediment settle.

Three days later, I sat down at my desk with a blank page and asked myself a simple question: What actually matters here? The answer turned out to be surprisingly short.

1: Ireland's Constitution commits the State to peace, international justice and respect for international law.

2; The Central Bank is legally structured to apply financial law and regulation, not to make independent foreign-policy or moral judgments about states.

3; The Irish Government may believe stronger action is justified, but argues that EU treaty arrangements limit how far a single member state can act alone.

4: EU sanctions policy generally depends on unanimity, meaning one state's position can be blocked by disagreement among the others.

That was it. Everything else seemed to arise from the interaction between those four statements. At that point I realised I was no longer writing about Israel bonds. I was looking at a recurring tension within modern democratic governance: the relationship between legal frameworks, moral imperatives and democratic authority.

Once that became clear, a new essay almost wrote itself.

The insight gained from that detour will now inform my return to the original question: not whether the tension exists, but whether campaigns such as Amnesty International's can play a meaningful role in testing it.

Read the essay https://rvw.ie/the-useful-tension>

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

Starting with a tension and staying with it long enough for something previously invisible to become visible has increasingly become the centre of my writing practice.

The essay linked below is an example of that approach. It begins with work that shaped my belief in the possibilities of dialogue, participation and persuasion, then follows a line of enquiry towards a conclusion I had resisted for many years.

Rather than resolving the tension, the piece attempts to remain with it long enough for its underlying structure to reveal itself.

Published in The Marshall Review: rvw.ie

Read the essay

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

I learned the word decimate in a school history lesson. I remember it well. Later, in an inter-school debating competition, I remember the pleasure of using it myself.

I was arguing that the proposal advanced by the opposing team was not merely damaging to society. It was asking people to participate in their own ruin. Rather like removing stones from the building's foundations in order to strengthen its walls.

Decimate seemed the perfect word.

The practice from which it emerged belonged to the Roman legions. A military unit judged guilty of an offence could be ordered to decimate itself. The punishment was horrifying precisely because it was collective and self-inflicted. One man in every ten was selected and killed by his comrades. The unit itself carried out the sentence.

That is what gave the word its extraordinary power. It did not simply describe destruction. It described a group compelled to become an instrument of its own punishment. Self-harm elevated to public policy.

Few English speakers hear that meaning today.

Ask someone what decimate means and they will probably say “destroy”, “devastate”, or “wipe out”. Dictionaries now largely accept those broader definitions because common usage has long since moved on. Language, after all, follows speakers rather than historians.

Yet something has been lost.

The older meaning carried a flavour that the modern one lacks. It contained ideas of complicity, discipline, participation and sacrifice. A forest may be devastated by fire. A city may be destroyed by war. But a legion decimated itself.

That distinction mattered.

So what should writers do with words like this? If you are writing for specialists, the historical meaning may still survive. But what if your audience hears only the modern sense? Do you continue to defend the older usage in the hope of preserving a fragment of linguistic history? Or do you accept that language changes, surrender gracefully, and move on?

I have chosen the latter.

This is probably the last time I will use the word decimate. Not because I have stopped admiring it, but because the meaning I admire is no longer the meaning most people hear.

So farewell, old friend.

May some future generation rediscover you, and understand why you once seemed such a remarkable word. David Marshall Sna Sceirí

I have just published a piece called “To Dig Where I Stand” on Marshall on Policy. It is not an essay on housing, infrastructure, energy, governance or any other policy topic, in away it's about all of them. It attempts to answer a question that I had not realised readers were asking:

“What exactly are these essays trying to do?”

The answer eventually led me to identify three principles that seem to have emerged from the writing itself:

• Understanding comes before prescription. • Sequencing is substance. • Relationships create outcomes.

They seem to have been present, sometimes only as undercurrents, in my essays about music, infrastructure, landscape and governance, long before I recognised them explicitly. Some assumptions run deep. Discovering them requires a degree of intellectual honesty, and perhaps a little perseverance.

That raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps an essayist does not invent a method so much as discover one, much as a river discovers its course.

A description often arrives as if it were direct.

It says: c = a.

But very often something has happened in between. There is a missing term, a mediating frame, a typology through which the description has become possible. What has been presented as direct recognition may in fact be recognition through b. The danger is not only that b may be forgotten. It is that b may become so familiar that it disappears into the description itself.

This is where consensus has value. Consensus is not merely agreement about the final description. It is a shared knowledge of the character and necessity of the mediating term. We know, together, why c can be described as a, because we share some understanding of b. Consensus, then, is a kind of social memory. It remembers the typology that the description has hidden. It preserves the route by which the fact became legible.

But this also explains the danger. Consensus can keep b alive, or it can bury it more deeply. What everyone knows may become what no one thinks to examine. So perhaps the question is not only whether we agree. It is whether our agreement still remembers what made agreement possible.

For Example A spirit level offers a simple illustration. When the bubble settles between the two lines, we say the shelf is level. The description arrives as if it were direct. Yet the claim rests on a mediating term: the behaviour of liquid under gravity, the calibration of the vial, the shared convention that this particular bubble’s position encodes “horizontal.” Consensus makes the reading feel immediate because everyone already remembers, or once remembered, how the tool works. But that same consensus can also bury the mediating term. The bubble becomes authoritative even when the vial is warped or the temperature is wrong. What looks like direct recognition is really recognition through a frame that has been naturalised into the act of seeing.

David Marshall Skerries

What happens when a question stops asking for an answer and begins asking to be understood?

Perhaps that is the moment it ceases to be a problem and becomes an essay.

David Marshall Skerries

Is poor education to blame for the fact that so many native English speakers can’t use bring and take correctly? Or have we collectively lost the ability to imagine where we are standing at any given moment?

Last week I read a piece in the Irish Independent in which a prominent journalist wrote something along the lines of: “an injured person was brought to the hospital.”

Really? Brought?

Was the journalist personally accompanying the ambulance? Were they clinging to the back bumper with a notebook and a sense of duty? Of course not. They were at their desk, probably eating a sandwich.

The correct verb is taken. As in: “the injured person was taken to the hospital, while the reporter remained safely at their keyboard.”

Where was the sub‑editor? Possibly also at lunch, – perhaps nibbling on the other half of that sandwich.

But, bring and take aren’t decorative. They contain actual information about location – a concept that, judging by modern usage, is now considered optional – like ironing, or basic geography.

Take these two sentences:

- “I will bring my laptop from home to the office.”

Translation: I am currently at the office, and I am promising to arrive tomorrow with my laptop and, presumably, a sense of purpose.

- “I will take my laptop from home to the office.”

Translation: I am not at the office. I might be at home. I might be in a café. I might be in a field. But I am definitely not at the office.

Now consider:

“I’m going to bring my colleague to the airport” versus

“I’m going to take my colleague to the airport.”

If you say bring, you are speaking from the airport. Perhaps you live there now. Perhaps you’ve set up a small tent beside Departures? Perhaps I need to contact Focus Ireland on your behalf?

If you say take, you are somewhere else – anywhere else – but not at the airport.

This is not advanced linguistics. This is not quantum mechanics. This is kindergarten‑level spatial reasoning. And yet, somehow, it’s evaporating.

Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s the collapse of editorial standards. Maybe we’ve all become so dependent on GPS that we no longer know where we are unless a mobile phone tells us.

But the distinction matters. Language loses something when we stop caring about perspective. And frankly, if we can’t manage bring and take, I fear for the future of lend and borrow.

“Borrow me your blue pencil, will you – the chief already has a lend of mine.”