Voice is very difficult to define. It is inherent in the way that each person writes, talks, and thinks. Managing to get a unique voice out onto the page seems like it should be easy, since we all can talk so easily in our own personal voices, but it is in fact insanely difficult. I think part of the difficulty is that in academic writing, we are encouraged to sound not like ourselves, but like academes. It is difficult to find the self-confidence to write an academic paper that is truly "you," and not a mere imitation of the other academic work you've read, or how you think something academic should sound.
For me, voice has always been one of the strongest facets of my writing. This poses a problem for me in how I would approach teaching voice. Since I have never struggled with this, how can I relate to those who have? I don't have any personal evidence of what helped me to break through, it has just always been there for me. When I was in middle school and high school, I never revised or spent time on my essays, but got good grades because my voice was convincingly academic and confident. I could write whole essays that said nothing.
So, I have to base my voice theories on theory. From what we have read, I think freewriting is the way I will attack this issue in my first classroom. I will encourage my students to freewrite in most, if not all, class periods that we have. I think I will try to assign various topics for the freewrites, to try to introduce them to different styles of writing and they can feel and see the difference. For example, I might have them write about a current events issue they feel strongly about to help prepare them for the 1.1 draft, or have them write me a paragraph about the best meal they've ever had, persuading me that it was a great meal, so they can practice persuasion before the same 1.1 argument draft.
Overall, I think the only way you can really experience voice is by writing it and feeling it in other people's writing. It's so complex and so simple at the same time.
1 comment:
Interesting thoughts, Kim. I see what you mean about doing something well, and then translating it -- like having to teach someone who is left-handed how to be right-handed, like you are (well, if you are right handed :). I do think modeling helps a great deal, and I see great value in showing people how they might do something differently. I think the idea of voice is lost in the term itself, and that we actually encourage students to use stream-of-consciousness writing technique when the reality is we want them to find their own style and tell about it, making it a much more reflexive activity than the punditication of the language -- I think that's why I never used the technology of taking tape and having it processed into text on my computer, because even though that would have saved me hours of time, I would have lost the context and tone and passion had I not taken time to listen to it all in my own head, make sense of it, and then let it come out from my mind through my fingers and onto the page, if that makes sense...
You are a very confident writer, and justifiably so. I hope your growth continues and that you head into teaching college writing (at UNL, see you there!).
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