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.