Losing Your Voice: Teaching Freshman Composition Students To Write What They Know (And Know What...

Losing Your Voice: Teaching Freshman Composition Students

To Write What They Know (And Know What They Write)

Rachel Astarte Piccione MFA, CLC, CCHt.

Published in The English Record Issue: Summer 2001

Piccione/Losing Your Voice... 2

Introduction

I first considered designing a course called “The Writer’s Voice” when I

read Nancy Sommers’ essay, “Between the Drafts.” Sommers dealt openly with

the frustrations of finding her individual voice in academic writing. Her almost

apologetic appeal reminded me of my own disappointments with essay writing.

In my copy of her essay, I underlined and drew a galaxy of stars around the

following:

...I disguised myself behind the authority of “the researcher,” attempting to bring in the weighty authority of Wayne Booth to justify my own statements, never gazing inward, never trusting my own authority as a writer. (27)

Why is it what we feel must assume another, more academic voice in

order to sound smart? I applauded her coming out; so someone finally told the

truth about the farce of what is considered good academic writing. The

academic voice seems to be a regurgitation of what some “real” (read

“published”) scholar has already said.

Further, there appears to be no room for individual experience, however

flawed or naïve -- especially where college composition courses are concerned.

After all, a large number of the students who take Freshman Composition are

not even of legal drinking age. How can we expect them to have a grandly

articulate grasp of the world?

Anyone who has ever read, written, or assigned a college essay

understands this dilemma. First, there is the average student’s gut reaction to


the mere word “essay”: her stomach plummets, shoulders slump... She

typically delays in finding a topic, formulating a thesis, and then -- for reasons

known only by higher spiritual powers -- picks the most tedious and/or painfully

standard essay topic to further wallow in the hell that she feels is essay writing

(say, an annotated history of hemlines from Civil War America to the present).

If the student has not driven herself into three-a.m.-and-it’s-still-not-done-

and-it’s-due-tomorrow hysteria and you do receive the paper on time, it’s a fairly

sure bet that the writing is about as fascinating as a VCR manual -- and probably

not as grammatically correct. In a sense, this student has lost her voice. She

suffers from a sort of literary laryngitis.

There are two items that need to be addressed before expository writing

students can advance even one syllable toward being effective writers. The first

is simple enough: Be sure the student chooses a topic which interests him.

What if the topic is assigned? Even the strictest of topics has several angles

students can take, avenues which interest them.

For example, Student X may be an aspiring weather reporter. Alas, he

must write a four-page essay about symbolism in King Lear (and he doesn’t even

like theatre). Who says that four fascinating pages cannot be devoted to the

storms and calms throughout the play and how they represent Lear’s mental

states? But that’s not the entire solution. Let’s say he now has found what I call

his “obsession topic” (weather) and can’t wait to get started writing. Why is it,

then, that his paper will still most likely sound like a regurgitated textbook on

cumulus and cirrus clouds? Where is that original passion? It seems that

Student X, too, has lost his voice.


This leads to the second item students need to understand: They must

stop hiding behind the great and powerful academician’s curtain, throwing that

rumbling voice onto their papers. Students need to find their own way of saying

what they have seen and learned.

Like the college students I was teaching, I too experienced the voice-

throwing problem. I wish had discovered sooner than graduate school (when I

read Sommers’ essay) that my voice was a valid one with which to write critical

essays. Something wonderful occurred to me, then. What if I could design an

entire course based on developing the skills of discovering and relying on one’s

voice?

I set to work on a syllabus for “The Writer’s Voice,” hoping this course

would help students find and trust their own voice -- as a resource as well as a

voice for discourse. Once that voice had been discovered, I aimed to guide

each student toward using it “effectively and appropriately to produce well-

thought-out, literate, persuasive essays.”

The Problem of Academic Versus Non-academic Discourse

The first difficulty I anticipated was that the students would

misunderstand this freedom to use one’s own voice. It might mean they could

use the vernacular (street slang, journalese, casual ramblings, etc.) to write their

essays. This brought up the concern of whether or not (or how much) I should

teach them about academic versus non-academic discourse. In the end, I


decided they would benefit the most from a practical approach, learning

primarily through writing, supplemented by reading examples of both types of

discourse. Hopefully, they would find a balance wherein some articulate yet

human voice could arise.

In discussing the problem of academic discourse, Peter Elbow explains in

his article, “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and

Colleagues,” that it “tries to be direct about the ‘position’ -- the argument and

reasons and claim. Yet it tends to be shy, indirect, or even evasive about the

texture of feelings that lie behind that position” (145). It would seem, then, that

there is no room for the expression of personal experience concerning a subject

that may be considered rudimentarily academic and/or critical.

I realize I’m making an assumption here: The voice is linked somehow to

feelings about a topic. I believe that is the only way to discover one’s voice. We

all have certain feelings about subjects in our lives. What we feel about those

subjects will inevitably alter the way we wish to write the essay -- the long lost art

of rhetoric.

For example, in my first-day lecture, I talked about discussing abortion in

an essay. “Even though it’s a hot topic, no one will write about it exactly the

way I will,” I assured them. “No one will glean research and incorporate it the

way I will.” Necessarily, then, an “old” topic will be made new again by my

view, my voice. As I do research, my gut feeling about the subject will cause me

to notice different facts and angles than others might. I may even change my

mind while I do that research.

Although the student may not have the advanced knowledge of a

professor or even a student in a higher grade level, she can prove her point, she


can show the audience the hard facts that back up her thesis. And is this not a

vital skill we try to teach composition students? The ideal result is an air-tight,

factual paper which has individual energy in it. The reader may get a better

sense of who the writer is. The writer’s thesis has a more human element to it;

there is a truer sense of communication.

Again, I reminded the class that this does not give them license to write

purely narrative essays; strict rules apply. With the freedom of writing from

one’s original thought with one’s original voice comes the responsibility of being

able to back up one’s claims solidly. It’s hard work. The idea is to not lose the

original passion for the subject when you compile your thoughts in essay form --

i.e., to not lose your voice.

What about the concern that the student’s voice may become blindingly

emotional and take over the ability to do objective research, produce a rational,

problem-solving essay?

To that, I can only say: For now, so what?

Currently, the result of a semester’s worth of most Freshman Composition

classes is sixty to one-hundred essays written by about twenty automatons. We

teachers get nosebleeds from how similar they sound. We pound our foreheads

because it seems no one can come up with an original thought. Academic

discourse forces the writer to stay behind that intellectual curtain whether or not

he has achieved the stature as an academician to write from that place, with that

voice (or non-voice) -- a thought which echoes loudly in Sommers’ essay.

Peter Elbow further states: ...we must beware of talking as though the academy has a monopoly on a sound intellectual stance

toward one’s material and one’s readers. Maybe


it’s not then, the intellectual stance or task that distinguishes academic discourse but certain stylistic or mechanical conventions -- not the deep structure but certain surface features. (143)

With this course, I wished to move away from the crutches of those

surface features and help students tap into the deep structure, learn that what

they may feel about a topic is as valid a thesis as one by any published scholar.

It’s likely that their theses and thought processes are not as developed as those

of a published scholar, but they need to know that it is all right not to be as

brilliant at eighteen years of age. What counts is learning the skills to articulate

oneself at whatever level one has achieved.

The Class

Part of learning what one’s gut reaction to a topic may be is learning that

one has a gut (or instinctual feeling) and how to listen to it. In order to clean the

dust and murkiness of that underground path to the unconscious that eighteen

years of culturally influenced life has most likely allowed to close up, the

students began each morning class session with a ten-minute freewrite, as set

forth by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.

Ironically, she offers strict rules for this wild, brain-to-pen exercise. They

are not hard to follow, though; they end up enforcing the idea of writing down

uncensored “first thoughts,” (8) with no attention to grammar, no crossing out,

no stopping.


I was pleased with the fact that only eleven days into the semester, I

came in, didn’t say a word, and from eight o’clock to eight-ten the students

were writing away. What did concern me was that as I looked around the room I

saw that many of the students stopped, re-read what they had written, or

paused to daydream. A few even began to arrive to class a convenient ten

minutes late, even after I spoke with them individually.

I mention these difficulties because this general inability to let go, even

temporarily, in their writing became apparent in several students’ essays, as well

as their thought processes once assigned readings began to challenge their

thinking skills later in the semester. It was as if freewriting were akin to some

New Age/Self Help remedy like rubbing crystals or chanting. Once they found

out Natalie Goldberg was a Jewish Zen Buddhist and I likened freewriting to

meditation, one student named Cami was the first to squinch up her nose:

“Weird.”

Not all students felt this way. One wrote in an anonymous survey I gave

the class: “I write freely and often now without worrying about the final content.

This technique has helped me deal with...essay writing and other classes.”

When we looked closely at Goldberg’s own writing style in Writing Down

the Bones, Jonathan noted that she “takes her time” and that “we may be able

to do that in our own writing.” Shannon added that although Goldberg takes

her time and is thorough, she doesn’t “waste” words. “She is very clear.”

Obviously, the most essential part of this course was the extended

process of writing their own essays. As they serve a fairly thorough

chronological map of the course itself—how we explored readings, looked at

the language in their own essays as well as the assigned ones—I will focus on


the first and the last essays, giving specific examples from students (at different

levels of writing skill) in order to address how the skills changed (or didn’t

change) during the semester.

Essay One

Since Christmas vacation had probably left everyone (including myself) a

little woozy, the first essay was a fairly standard compare-contrast/narrative

based on two essays about parent-child relationships: Nancy Friday’s

“Competition,” and Adrienne Rich’s “The Anger of a Child.”

Conversation went well after they read the pieces. Granted, I was lucky

to have most of the students awake and able to speak at eight in the morning.

And I will openly admit that I tend to get overly excited when I talk about

writing; I jump up and down a lot and wave my arms around like a lunatic. This

may have had some bearing on how alert the class got. Eventually, I parlayed

my demonstrative eagerness into safe blackboard diagrams.

First, we discussed Friday’s voice, why she wrote the paper, and what it

meant to the topic of jealousy -- the language she used, etc. In addition, we

talked about what I call “the big picture” of the essay (here’s where I open my

arms and wave them to include the whole universe). Writing with a big picture

in mind transcends the reductive problem-solution format. It says: This may look

like a story about how jealous I am of my sister, but it also speaks to you and

your sister (or brother, or mother, or friend...).


The class had mixed feelings about liking the essay and liking Friday’s

voice. Specifically, Jami pointed out her disappointment with the last paragraph

of the essay as it moved from the “personal” language of a narrative to

“general” or “textbook” language. Since the rest of the class mumbled

agreement, I asked them to pick out words which showed this. Jami led us with

the extensive use of the word “I” in the bulk of the paper and Derek came up

with the corresponding phrase “the sexes” in the final paragraph. There is a

distance there. One person becomes a mass which is prone to stereotypical

behavior.

I asked the students then to write for twenty minutes about jealousy:

“Address a jealousy you have or had and try to resolve it in some way.”

Students were hesitant to read their work aloud. In order to avoid a forced

persona-voice, I hadn’t forewarned them I would ask. But eventually four spoke

up.

I could see from the passages that detail would be an important skill to

cover. For example, Jami mentioned a friend who possessed a list of positive

attributes, the last of which was “integrity.” So, in addition to “integrity,” they

needed to know how to explain what makes a person possess it.

We talked longer than I had expected about Rich’s essay, “The Anger of

a Child.” For the purpose of comparison, I also passed out copies of her poem,

“Splittings,” which deals with the same topic as her essay: the relationships

between a mother and daughter through the daughter’s childhood and her own

movement into motherhood. We discussed the language in it as opposed to

the language she used in her essay.


Cami thought (as she would think for the duration of the semester about

any piece of writing which was not a standard essay with a relatively accessible

thesis) that it was “weird.” This was helpful, since she got to tell me which

words or phrases were weird. For her it was mostly a lack of chronology; the

poem moves like a wave of pain, capitalized sometimes and not punctuated in

others. Phrases like, “cry primordial loneliness,” for example, jarred her as well

as a few others. The time we took to notice these specifics ended up

illuminating my original point; different language is used for different purposes,

though the topic may remain the same.

Ian, a theatre major, was a good devil’s advocate for the class discussion,

although I’m sure he didn’t realize it. He found Rich’s voice in the essay to be

“whiny and wishy-washy.” The rest of the class looked at me in unison; they

already anticipated my reaction. I asked Ian to point out examples. He really

couldn’t find any. So he reworded his point, stating, “She never really comes to

a conclusion.” Javier disagreed, saying that the conclusion is that she can’t

arrive at a conclusion about her relationship with her mother.

I asked the class to come up with a thesis for the essay. Steve gave a

several-sentence theme-idea which began with, “It’s about a woman who is mad

at her mother...”

“So, what’s the thesis?” I asked again.

Jonathan elaborated, “She’s mad at her mother and it’s screwed up her

life.”

“So, what’s the thesis?” Someone offered another theme, different

angle. “So,” I said, smiling, “What’s the thesis?” A few students laughed.

“One sentence,” I offered. “It’s good practice to be able to sum up an essay in


one sentence. That includes your own. It helps you stay focused on the crux of

what you’re trying to share with your audience.”

Javier became distressed that there was no such sentence in the text. I

told him it didn’t necessarily have to be her sentence. Good writers make clear

points without banging readers over the head. Eventually, we did come up with

a collective thesis: Rich can’t resolve her anger at her mother, but now

understands it, being a mother herself. This is something to which we all can

relate -- camaraderie in experience.

For their essay assignment, I asked them to compare and contrast

Friday’s and Rich’s essays in terms of their own life. Which woman’s life does

theirs most resemble, if at all? If they have nothing in common with these

women, how do their lives differ? I asked them to remember the big picture:

“What will you teach us about your life that may teach us something about our

own?”

This assignment seemed to work well as a bridge between their favorite

essays -- personal narratives -- and the skill of analyzing their own lives using

literature as a tool for research. It asked them to link personal experience with

texts and concepts, and to think critically about that coveted pool of resource

from which they have, until now, believed only “fun” writing could come -- their

own lives.

The following is Ian’s* introductory paragraph (with its original grammar).

I choose to focus on it for one, basic reason, which I will address momentarily. In reckoning with the role of their mother in their

* I have used pseudonyms for the authors of the quoted texts.


lives, rich and Friday in their very sentimental essays show a great deal of regret for not knowing their mothers better. They are reaching out to their youth. I can feel their fingers groping for those awkward lanky days of puberty, those innocent days of childhood. In life for a lot of us, the innocence of the child and the realization of the adult are forged together in a moment of epiphany—my goodness, my mother is not perfect, never was perfect, and will always be a normal human being such as myself. A mother’s failure to protect brings about the realization for the child about the way things really are.

Except for needing a few grammatical and stylistic adjustments, this is a

solid introduction. But later in the paper, Ian’s pensive voice took over as he

seemed to get absorbed in writing about childhood memories of solitary

playtimes and a father who attended regular AA meetings. There were no

specific examples from the assigned essays, as was required.

However, the penultimate paragraph began, “Reading the two essays for

me was like overhearing a ruminating therapy session in which the shrink really

regrets ever having asked, ‘Tell me about your mother’.” And later: “I feel like

calling [Friday and Rich] up and saying, ‘You love your mother, obviously, and

you don’t need to justify your anger or competitiveness towards her at all. I

understand that...but GET OVER IT....Put her in a nice home’.”

Ian’s thesis was in the conclusion (as was the case for most of the

students) and couched in a sardonic voice which tends to put readers off.

Although this paper had serious flaws, I was secretly thrilled; this student had a

voice, albeit a loud and annoying voice, but it is always easier to tone down than

create what isn’t there at all.


In comparison, here is the introductory paragraph that Pat, an aspiring

musician from Los Angeles, wrote: After reading Nancy Friday’s “Competition” and Adrienne Rich’s “The Anger of a Child”, I found a similarity between Friday and myself. Although I was never in competition with my family members, both Friday and myself appeared to be the black sheep of the family. This made me realize that

everybody has their own formula to life.

The language here is what I would call “standard essay” language.

Phrases which served to set up the essay such as, “After reading...I...” and the

too-quick, assertive nature of the final sentence of the paragraph exemplify this

impoverished approach. Also, there were grammatical errors throughout -- a

particularly glaring one in the final sentence. (Teaching students pronoun

agreement has always been a personal crusade for me.) As with Ian’s paper, Pat

wandered through a life story narrative in the body of the essay, but did attempt

to make comparisons with at least one of the writers: Although Friday went to family activities, mentally she appeared to be somewhere else. During my family bbq’s I was physically somewhere else. I have learned that in order to comprehend information, your mind must be focused at all times.

Where did that last sentence come from? I later found this to be typical

of Pat’s essays; the mind moved faster than the pen and Pat did not seem to


have a sense of audience. I can’t help but wonder if that sentence was some

unconscious reminder to the writer that the essay was wandering.

In working with Pat, I asked for the famous one-liner -- “the big picture” --

within the essay. Urging Pat to come up with an over-all sentence that covered

the entire point of the essay helped the voice to stay focused.

I suggested to all of the students that they write their thesis on a 3 x 5

card and tape it above their computers, to the side of their notebooks, wherever

they can see it as they write. At any given point during the writing process the

sentence they have just written should either support, reflect, or directly address

the thesis sentence on the card. If it doesn’t, get rid of it.

Essays Two and Three

The progression through the next two essays went slowly. I reminded

students of what we’d learned about using voice effectively and grammar

correctly (they seemed to forget from one essay to the next). By the end of the

semester, I had experienced the course’s existential darkness and I was more

than ready for the light.

Essay Four

I worried from the beginning about how to teach A Little Book on the

Human Shadow. It’s a book of transcribed readings by poet Robert Bly about a


relatively modern psychological phenomenon (the “shadow,” or, dark

unconscious), first noticed by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss analyst. By now, Cami’s

“weird” detector was flashing red, whistling, and smoking.

“What does this psychological stuff have to do with the writer’s voice?”

Jami moaned, once we’d reached the middle of the book.

I was hoping someone would ask me that.

There are two main reasons I assigned the book. The first has most

directly to do with the title of the course. This book offers a new way of looking

at society, friends, family, and -- here’s the keyword -- oneself. As writers, we

owe it to ourselves to keep our eyes open, always ask “why.” It is a look into

the “why” of our conscious existence as affected by the unconscious. Imagine

how much richer our voices can be if we look closely at ourselves, ask ourselves:

Why do I react this way? Why do I love or hate this thing? Why do others?

The second reason is more academic. In order to look closely at

language and how it functions, I chose a relatively difficult topic which had been

written about very differently by two authors. I passed out copies of Jung’s

essay about the shadow, taken from his collected works, Aion: Researches into

the Phenomenology of the Self, so they could compare his definition with Bly’s.

Here is Carl Jung’s definition of the shadow:

The most accessible of these [psychological

archetypes], and the easiest to experience, is the shadow, for its nature can in large measure be inferred from the contents of the personal unconscious....To be conscious of it

involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-


knowledge, and therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. (145)

And here is Robert Bly’s definition, from the opening paragraph of his

book:

We notice that when sunlight hits the body,

the body turns bright, but it throws a shadow, which is dark. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Each of us has some part of our personality that is hidden from us. Parents, and teachers in general, urge us to Develop the light side of the personality -- move into well-lit subjects such as mathematics and geometry -- and to become successful. The dark part then becomes starved.

What do we do then? We send out a crow. (7)

The language, though discussing the same subject, is obviously different.

College students are more accustomed to grinding their way through text like

Jung’s. What was it, then, that confused them about Bly?

I read each sentence of Bly’s paragraph aloud, and asked them to stop

me when they got lost. It was the crow that threw them. This began a

discussion about image and symbolism in essay writing. In this case, the crow is

a dark bird; something dark must be sent into the psyche in order to meet and

retrieve darkness.

Which passage was more enjoyable to read? It seemed that Bly’s was,

but for precisely the same reason it confused them at first. He uses images,

symbols, and examples to illustrate his point.


This was the hardest section to teach without lecturing. How else were

they going to understand the concept enough to apply it in an essay? I allowed

myself one lecture day, diagramming for the six students who showed up (there

was a snow storm that morning) the life-time shadow journey of Mr. (or Ms.) X.

I drew a circle on the board which represented the psyche of a newborn -

- whole and full of wild energy. I blackened in wedges where the shadow takes

over (parents tell you to stop biting your sister, teachers tell you to sit still and

talk in turn, groups of friends dictate the clothing you must wear, wife or

husband pressures you to sacrifice what you love in order to make money --

which results in a sudden, irrational hatred of men in suits, etc.). By the end of

the class period, my pie chart of the human psyche looked like a giant hairball. I

was exhausted, but I think I got through to them. At least a little.

Jonathan said that Bly’s concept of doing “shadow work” (becoming

aware of and “retrieving” these hidden parts of ourselves in order to be whole

again) reminded him of Natalie Goldberg’s idea of tapping into the language of

the unconscious in freewriting.

This connection was a pivotal point in the semester. It was important that

they understand that everything we read and talked about in class was

connected in some way, either by concept or by use of language.

The essay assignment asked students to find evidence of the shadow and

the process of retrieving it (as described by Bly) in either a piece of literature, a

film, a current political event, or aspect of modern society. In other words, find

the shadow anywhere in the world and write about it.


I had conferences with the students beforehand and was genuinely

excited by the potential I saw in the theses students presented to me. I felt like

the director of the school play, working with the students on their skits before

they performed in front of the whole school for the Easter Pageant.

It seemed they understood the material, even chose topics which

obviously interested them, but a few were staying at a safe distance from them -

- behind the curtain so they wouldn’t get their hands dirty. Christi, editor of the

school newspaper, wished to write about homosexual men in the military.

“What about it?” I asked her.

“Homophobia,” she said. “How being homophobic will hurt the men

who don’t want gays in.”

“How is it going to hurt them? What’s their problem with it? Besides

their fear some soldier will pinch their butt on the battlefield.”

“I did some research,” Christi told me. “They say it just won’t be the

same anymore.”

“‘Manly’,” I offered.

“Yeah.”

Christi ended up writing about a much bigger picture than just the

psychological breakdown of the angry, heterosexual military man. She

addressed the topic of projection of stereotypical masculinity onto soldiers and

how there seems to be great resistance to gays in the military because that

stereotype will have to be restructured. No longer will men be able to hide

inside a uniform as a persona of manliness. There is a call to rethink what it

means to be a man -- for all men.


Ian scrambled at the opportunity to write about a favorite film, Star Wars,

with Luke representing the conscious part of the psyche, and Darth Vader as the

other half of Luke, his shadow. Ian seemed hesitant, though: was it really all

right to write a critical paper about something fun?

There were three drafts of Ian’s essay, the first two full of biting anecdotes

about “losers” who didn’t like Star Wars and a crotchety high school literature

teacher named Miss Ryan who forced the class to read stuffy novels and

produce perfect (-ly boring) essays. Yet, once the essay got going, there was a

flowing investigation of Star Wars in terms of the shadow. Ironically, Ian had

done exactly what the teacher had been urging in high school! In the end of the

essay, there was even a correlation between the conscious and the shadow and

Ian and the teacher. But there was that killer sardonic voice again.

How could I explain that I appreciated Ian’s original voice, but that this

burlesqued level would keep readers away? Just like that, I guess. I told Ian

that there were terrific things going on in the essay and I’d hate to see someone

put the paper down before even getting to them. Ian grimaced and scuffled out

of my office.

When I received the final draft a week later, it had been dramatically

pared down. No Miss Ryan, no accusatory tone, just the love of a film and how

it has new meaning for Ian.

I nearly wept in my little cubby hole office (which, by the way, I shared

with seven other teachers). But I was concerned. Part of me felt like Nurse

Ratched -- had I forced Ian to lobotomize the life out of his McMurphy-wild

essay? I could almost hear the whisper outside of class: “Just do what she says.

Get it over with.” Luckily, this was not the case. Ian informed me that while


cutting out that bulk of the essay “changed what it said,” it didn’t change the

feelings behind it. (I gave Ian’s final draft an A, by the way.)

What I saw happening in the class was a slight but wonderful shift. Ian

wasn’t the only one to show improvement. Most of the other students, too,

produced more interesting and original papers than they had thus far in the

course.

Derek’s essay investigated the shadow in Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart. Javier

compared the shadows of an Emerson College student and a Harvard Law

student. Pat wrote about shadow projection in the music industry (talent agents

projecting fame onto potential music stars then ripping them off by taking too

large a cut of royalties or dropping the talent outright) with, it should be

mentioned, a newfound proficiency in pronoun agreement. Even Cami found an

intriguing way to deal with such weirdness as the shadow. Her essay, which

reported on the repressed anger-shadow in flight attendants, was entitled, “Fly

the Friendly Skies.”

I wondered what it was about this essay assignment which produced such

angst as we read over the material, yet resulted in such thoroughly individual

work. I’m still not sure, but I like to think that my reinforcement of “making a

topic your own” finally made sense to them. But as you’ll see, this may not be

the case.

The Survey


I think it would be interesting to note a few responses to the most vital

question of a survey I gave at the end of the semester.

Q. Did this course live up to its title? Why or why

not?

A. “Yes,... because it allowed us to write essays according to our own views and how we perceived the assignments we were given.” A. “I felt the course did not live up to my definition of ‘The Writer’s Voice.’ I feel the ‘writer’s voice’ should be whatever the writer feels passionate about and feels the need to communicate. This can not be done if the writers can not associate with the topics given them.” A. “Yes; it provided 4 good essays to show the writers voice through: • personal, family experience • researching potential career • movie watching • book examples And, it allowed the voice to ‘grow’ and be discovered in journal writing.” A. “...I did learn how to ignore my inner critic...but my voice never seemed to come out. I have always felt that my writer’s voice fades into a mound of facts and words.”

I was intrigued by the dichotomy of these comments, obviously more so

by the negative ones, considering the fact that each essay assignment was


carefully designed to be open-ended so that each student could find his

particular obsession topic within it.

This knowledge, combined with the physical evidence I had (i.e., the

essays themselves), made me curious why some students felt this course had

failed them in a way. It would seem that the very thing which concerned me at

the beginning, that the students would misunderstand the writer’s voice to mean

writing pure narrative, was what occurred (at least for these two students).

However, this misunderstanding could not be the case. It was obvious their

work had accomplished a solid foundation for development of the voice. They

even defined it properly later in the survey, calling it: “the way the writer

speaks...to a certain audience,” and that if “[that] voice is perfected, then a

reader will be able to tell who the author is.”

Subsequently, in our final class discussion, we redefined the writer’s voice

to reinforce the idea that the very angle one takes on a particular topic can

influence voice. Often, it is a large part of the voice itself. I would be

preposterous to read a page of statistics on the divorce rate in America and say,

“Oh, this is definitely Julia’s writing,” or “This graph is so Shannonesque.”

What we need to pay attention to is not getting bogged down by those

“mounds of facts,” but, rather letting them support our heartfelt thesis, our

obsession topic.

It seemed that those dissatisfied students didn’t realize what they had

accomplished in their writing. Furthermore, there was the interesting twist of

overlooking the autonomy they received to investigate their lives and choose

writing topics from them by announcing that I gave no freedom in my


assignments. Now the chronic tardiness made more sense. There seemed to

be a reluctance to join in this adventure away from the standard method of

collegiate essay-writing, away from purely academic discourse. It was too hard

to introspect for a semester, to come up with new and possibly uncomfortable

conclusions about oneself. (Am I a nerd now that I understand some

psychology? Now that I like poetry?)

As in Christi’s essay, where she noted that men need to come out from

hiding behind the masculine persona of the military man, these students needed

to step out from behind the persona of the college student. They needed to

stop churning out essays so mind-numbingly efficiently that they no longer

cared to think about what they were saying in those essays or how they were

saying it.

So, how can students begin to move forward on the path to discovering

and using their voice? Freewriting honors the unconscious ramblings from

where our ideas originate. Choosing topics which fascinate us (or altering them

slightly so they do) also helps. The practice lies in not giving in to the resistance

to too-sudden order, to beefing up an essay with someone else’s words in order

to get the boost over the academic wall into accepted scholastic discourse. “It’s

been drilled into us,” one student told me in an emotional conference. “It’s

hard to let go.”

Perhaps it is not necessary to let go altogether. As parents, we don’t

expect our babies to run at full, adult pace before they walk. We cheer on each

wobbly step. In the same respect, it is our duty as instructors to help students

get a firm foothold in the skill of essay writing before they speed away in

brilliance.


Nancy Sommers made the plea, “I want my students to know how to

bring their life and their writing together” (30). As instructors, we can start by

aiding students to develop such skills as using other voices in the form of quotes

to illuminate a thesis but not speak for it. We can give students the freedom to

not be completed thinkers, but, rather, use the essay form as a problem-solving

and/or investigative tool. If we help narrow the chasm between our students’

life experiences and their ability to write about them, they will surely develop a

strong, individual voice while possessing the literary tools necessary to sing out

with that voice -- and be heard.


WORKS CITED

Bly, Robert. A Little Book on the Human Shadow. Ed. William Booth. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Elbow, Peter. “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues.” College English 53 (Feb. 1991) : 135-153. Friday, Nancy. “Competition.” Life Studies: A Thematic Reader, Third Edition. Ed. David Cavitch. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambhala, 1986. Jung, C.G. The Portable Jung. Ed. Joseph Campbell. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Rich, Adrienne. “The Anger of a Child.” Life Studies: A Thematic Reader, Third Edition. Ed. David Cavitch. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Rich, Adrienne. “Splittings.” Contemporary American Poetry, Fifth Edition. Ed. A. Poulin, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991. Sommers, Nancy. “Between the Drafts.” College Composition and Communication 43 (Feb. 1992): 23-31.

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