RESPONSE: THE RIGHT TO FIND YOUR OWN VOICE

As I mentioned in an earlier response, I don’t know when I first became aware of voice in writing, but I certainly recognized when it was missing in my students’ writing.  By the time I encountered students in high school, many had learned to adapt their writing to fit the expectations of standards/assessments.  If our only purpose in teaching students to write is for a test, then I suspect that “voice” will be missing.  However, the most memorable writing, writing that really touches us, definitely includes voice.  “Voice is at the heart of the act of writing.”  (p. 76 in Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing, 3^rdEdition, by Dan Kirby, Dawn Latta Kirby, Tom Liner)

The diversity of the classroom with the variety of experiences/cultures is a great resource for observing/developing voice in writing.  Think how you are able to quickly recognize a student – personality (choice of words, etc.)  Probably the best place to help develop voice is by having students keep journals where they can try different strategies.  These writing journals are usually not graded (except for maintaining) and often not even read by the teacher, unless the student offers or is asked to select an entry for submission. 

One activity I used with my students was to have them borrow (without permission) a friend’s car and have an accident.   Then they were to write a note to the friend – write a note to their parent – write a note to the police explaining the accident.  By comparing the choice of words, sentence structure, and tone in the notes, they noticed how purpose/audience determine voice.  This activity could easily be adapted to other situations/audiences.  Chapter 6: Different Voices, Different Speakers in the Kirby/Liner book contains excellent strategies for helping students recognize and develop voice in their writing.  

Even in writing academic papers, students need to be aware of voice.  It is extremely important to be able to control the subject matter.  I had a professor who recommended that we free write about a topic at least three-four times to determine our commitment to a subject and to discover whether we had a workable understanding of the topic.  Remember those warnings from your writing instructor:  Don’t use first person! Don’t use any contractions!  If we take a look at effective writing – writing that really has a purpose, I suspect that we will discover the writer doesn’t heed these warnings.  Have your students bring in examples of writing they find to be quite effective and discuss the characteristics in class.

As American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver shares, “I think that a writer’s signature should be on his work, just like a composer’s signature should be on his work. If you hear a few bars of Mozart, you don’t need to hear too much to know who wrote that music, and I’d like to think that you could pick up a story by me and read a few sentences or a paragraph, without seeing the name, and know it was my story.” 

This is a worthy goal for all of us writers!

9 THE RIGHT TO FIND YOUR OWN VOICE

Having a voice, being heard and having someone recognize who you are and what matters to you is a part of our human fabric today, and we need to encourage it in our writers. Spandel calls voice, "the human spirit."

The passionate voices today in the Black Lives Matter Movement speak to a topic they know well. Encouraging students to write from the heart, to talk about friends, vacations, celebrations and passions that they know well, will encourage them to write with voice. When we read a piece with voice in it, we suddenly know a little bit about the person who wrote it. We hear passion and compassion, disdain and anger, humor and regret.

So, how important is it to teach voice? Most students know how to write a passing paper that skims the surface of a topic, yet covers all the main points. Voice requires a deeper investment by the writer. They actually have to understand the topic and how they feel about it. They need to decide whether this is a topic they can become personally invested in. For voice to come out, there has to be a measure of caring about the topic and a willingness to put feelings down on paper. Conferencng with students about their topics can encourage them to really think about their relationship to the topic and their feelings surrounding it. Allowing students to choose their own topics helps tremendously or giving a range of related topics to choose from helps them as writers become involved with the topic.

Asking students to write about their relationship to the topic, to think about past situations of their own that coincide with the topic positively or negatively will help spark voice. "When we honor voice, we show profound respect for what students have to say." (Spandel) As we prepare for teaching in the fall, let's not forget to include opportunities for students to use their voices, for diverse opinions to be heard and for time to let students know that what they say and how they say it matters.

RESPONSE :THE RIGHT TO GO BEYOND FORMULA

With sheltering in place and social distancing, my husband and I have not had any opportunities to eat out, share meals with friends or have people to our home. I've always cooked for our family, and I think I am a fair cook, but I've had one disaster after another with baking in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bread-baking has been my nemesis. I have always gotten great satisfaction out of baking homemade bread - even at one time baked my way through The Bread Bakers Apprentice cookbook. Since the epidemic, I haven't baked a decent loaf of bread. The problem? I have only been able to purchase instant yeast, and every recipe calls for active dry yeast. Not understanding the ratios of one to the other, I doubled the amount of yeast the first time, and when the ingredients were very dry, doubled the water. It was one sticky mess, and when baked, our sharpest knife could not pierce its crust! Another time, I did not notice ahead of time that the dough needed to sit 12 hours or overnight before baking. I had the dough mixed and was planning on it for dinner. After 6 hrs, I baked it anyway and ended up with another dense pancake.

Baking and writing. How are they linked? One has a recipe. Do we need a formula for the other? Is it safe to go outside the formula, or like baking, does that spell disaster? Spandel in The 9 Rights of Every Writer says that "formulaic writing will take our young writers to the upper limits of mediocrity...it is devoid of complexity, passion, surprise or art." Are we teaching our students to be better writers or to write so that we can easily correct and read what they have written? I have always found that when I didn't impose formula on my students, they wrote much more interesting essays...essays from the heart. Hillocks alleges that formula doesn't support higher thinking skills and actually stifles critical thought. (The Testing Trap:How State Assessments Control Learning. New York: Teachers College.)

How do we let go of formula and what do we replace it with? One way is to expose students to quality writing and have them imitate it. Flood your students with well-written pieces and have them analyze their structure. Where does the author place her thesis sentence? How is the piece organized? Look at sentence structure and length. What types of sentences are used? How does the piece conclude? Finally, have them write in the style of the author. Students can easily critique each other after having analyzed the example and attempted the style themselves. You will be surprised at how the quality of writing will improve in a short time. Authentic voices will emerge and creativity will show itself.

Begin by trying it yourself. Take a paragraph like this one from "The Elegant Eyeball," an essay by John Gamel.
They aren't what most people think they are. Human eyes touted as ethereal objects by poets and novelists throughout history are nothing more than white spheres, somewhat larger than your average marble, covered by a leather-like tissue known as sclera and filled with nature's facsimile of Jell-O. your beloved's eyes may pierce your heart, but in all likelihood they closely resemble the eyes of every other person on the planet. At least I hope they do, for otherwise he or she suffers from severe myopia (nearsightedness,  hyperopia (farsightedness), or worse.

Find an object to describe and then create similar sentences using your own experiences with the object. I used to do something similar with my 8th grade students when we were studying Langston Hughes' poem, "Mother to Son." Students would write their own versions from different points of view -  coach to player or father to daughter, etc. using the patterns of lines in the poem. Some great writing was created. More than that, students began to understand that there was no one way to write a poem. They began to think about and incorporate new elements into their own poems.

Unlike baking, it is when we go beyond the formula/recipe that delicious writing happens.