This year, one of my goals is to focus on student voice in writing. I hope to share my journey with all of you as I embark on an odyssey that promises a path shrouded in overgrowth, littered with browns and greens yet to be unearthed.
Voice & Tone: Spoken Voice as means of Debunking Writing Voice Myth
We all know it in conversation. We are trained to recognize vocal pitch, inflection and pacing from the time we are born. These create the implied nuances of tone through the juxtaposition of verbal and non-verbal communication in any dialogue or conversation. It is a common experience that society and humans share. It’s where the cliche “universal language” comes from.
Yet, in the written world of high school English classes a myth about voice perpetuates its elusiveness. That being, it is solely a creative endeavor (i.e. poetry and narratives). Thus leaving literary analysis, expository, and persuasive essays as formal modes of writing that stifle the creative voice of student writers. Essentially, 90 percent of students hear formal as soon as an essay is mentioned. This happens at all levels and abilities (I’ve witnessed in my AP classes as well as remedial classes I taught in the public sector).
Just as many teachers before me, I have seen this myth dominate the approach the majority of students take to any “[non-]creative writing” assignment.
Yet, I must admit I have never intentionally focused on debunking this myth.
My work with my AP class in conjunction with teaching Podcasting & Storytelling sparked a new idea: Making my students written voices audible to them through helping them visualize their writing. This, in turn, can lead to students developing a voice that is the “eyes of the reader” (stolen from Michael Schooler).
What does that look like… let alone mean? I know it makes no sense. Yet, my mind is fixated on creating a formula to do just that.
This will require multiple one-on-one meetings with myself and time for peer feedback as well. Not to mention the importance of writing frequently and often across various modes of writing.
As I enter my second decade of teaching, I also am reflecting on my prior writing career as a sports journalist. The one-on-one, face-to-face meetings are imperative to progressing as a writer. It is what helped me develop as a writer. It is what I try to provide for my students.
While I have always readily given up my lunches, breaks and X blocks to meet with students, I realize that I need to be more intentional in building voice workshops into my class time as well. Admittedly, I struggle with what this looks like and the impact it will have on time for my overall curriculum. But, I know it is paramount to teaching voice in my vision.
Voice is created in multiple ways. First, diction and sentence structure create mood. The writers’ voice is then able to create tone through the combination of mood and pacing. Sentence length, syntax and punctuation in addition to rhetorical appeals (ethos, logos, pathos) help develop pacing to reinforce the mood. A circular pattern, really.
There is also room for creative voice in literary devices (i.e. parallelism, allusions, alliteration). If we want our student voices to develop, we have to enable them to bring themselves into their writing.
While the literary analysis and the close reading process have students focus on voice in the texts we cover, it doesn’t naturally translate to student voice in writing.
Still, formal writing leaves room for creative voice. I am still figuring out exactly what that looks like.
My first thoughts are: the best use is to help students stick to the text they focus any formal essay on. Next, students must learn to master embedding the authors voice as the color in their writing (stealing idea from Voltaire with the colors used to paint the voice) . The analogy I have developed is that the student writer is the play-by-play announcer while the concrete details from the author(s) provide the color to their voice.
I feel like I have a direction at this point. But, I am also excited about promised dead ends to come. Somehow. Someway. The path will open to lush soil if I just keep digging.
Good to see how your thinking is progressing as you explore this idea this year. In Speak for Yourself by Susanne Rubenstein (the book I loaned you), she really advocates for finding examples of strong voice in writing to model what it looks like for students. Maybe we should form a repository of works that demonstrate different examples of voice that we can pull from as we teach this concept. You know I love David Sedaris, but The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The Catcher in the Rye come to mind too. I think the more practice students have experimenting with voice, the more it will seep into all of their writing. I'm all for dispelling the notion that vapid, voiceless "formal" (as our students would say) essays are somehow what we desire!
I love that you are helping your students find their voice in writing. I remember really struggling with this in high school and college. What helped me in college was being able to receive feedback from my professor and being allowed to constantly reflect and revise on my work. It's hard to find the time to meet one on one with all of your students so I think finding a way to incorporate that into class will be great. Keep us posted!
Lesley, thank you for your reply. Hearing your input helps to validate the importance I am placing on conferencing.
Michael, yes I am looking forward to reading the book that comes highly recommended from you and Tiz. I love the idea of creating a repository of different examples of voice and writing modes for our students. My sister, who is currently working on her French Literature dissertation, recently told me that it's "a bummer" that "people outside my work think that my writing practice must be dull and straightforward", thus lacking voice. She recommended having a repository of academic/scholarly/journalistic examples of voice. Thus, students can model voice from the "pros" in their writing over time.
not familiar with the term "universal language" … I am blinded by the linguistics vocab drilled in me by Chomsky which refers to the innate grammatical imperatives that are embedded in human creation of language.
I love that you are focusing on voice and emphasizing the fact that a literary essay does not mean a person has to leave their "voice" at the door. The truth is that that it is often possible to recognize the author when reading just by reading a passage… the fact is that if nothing else we have verbal tics and they carry over into our writing. I have been told by people who are close to me that have read something I have written that they can hear my voice in their head (it sounds creepy the way I just said that)…
But stealing from Michael's idea of the Catcher in the Rye and some other choice pieces … I am sure that you could put what are seemingly generic passages and place snippets and have a game of having the kids vote what author (that you have studied) it belongs to… by extension… you could do the same thing with pieces of writing of students that have worked together peer reviewing each other's works… see if they can identify the source… 😉