The term voke derives from vocare: to call, and from the etymology of voice, sound, language, and tone; it also means to address, to bring to speech. But the voking dimension of phenomenological method is not only to speak and produce text that demonstrates our understanding of something. When we speak, we tend to stop listening to the object about which we speak. And now this object has lost its addressive and enigmatic power. Something can only speak to us if it is listened to, if we can be addressed by it.
The voking features of a text have to do with the recognition that a text can “speak” to us, that we may experience an emotional and ethical responsiveness, that we may know ourselves addressed. There exists a relation between the writing structure of a text and the voking effects that it may have on the reader. The more vocative a text, the more strongly the meaning is embedded within it; hence, the more difficult to paraphrase or summarize the text and the felt understandings embedded within it.