My current crop of YA reading includes Jonathan Stroud's new Bartimaeus book, The Ring of Solomon, which reveals some of the demon's past in Jerusalem, where he makes sassy djinn comments on humanity's weaknesses, with footnotes; Helen Frost's Keesha's House, a book in poems (starting off with sestinas! not an easy form) about kids in trouble who need a safe house; Paul B. Janeczko's Worlds Afire, also poems, telling the story of a 1944 circus fire; Paul Fleischman's Dateline: Troy, which I've meant to read for some time now and which tells the Trojan story in spare text juxtaposed with newspaper clippings from the present to make the visual as well as textual point that our great stories from the past are repeated today; Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, a werewolf story told in two voices.
Then there are the professional books: Steven L. Layne's Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers; Nancie Atwell's The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers; Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child; Kelly Gallagher's Teaching Adolescent Writers; two by Tom Romano, Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers and Crafting Authentic Voice. I just finished Cynthia Carbone Ward's How Writers Grow: A Guide for Middle School Teachers. I think that's all I'll admit to reading concurrently right now, though I've dipped into a few more that I plan to commit to quite soon--Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell, and Storm Front by Jim Butcher (because Karrah loves the Dresden Files so much), along with James Bucky Carter's edited collection, Building Literary Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel and Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing.
I am a grazer and sampler of books. I love moving back and forth among a variety of genres and styles. At Christmas time I was rereading Jane Austen, and I've been working at a biography of Coleridge on and off for close to a year. Last (academic) year, I taught Senior Seminar in English and spent lots of time with nineteenth-century British lit (my first love as a reader--unless you count my childhood obsession with fairy tales), and while I was writing Reading Julia Alvarez (just released March 30), I read several Caribbean and U.S. Latino writers' works. Last fall I took a big turn back into the literature related to my upper-level writing classes, mostly creative nonfiction, and I just bought a William Stafford book I didn't already own, along with Bret Lott's Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life and Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate.
It's obvious that something ignited "a lifelong passion for reading" in me! In the past couple weeks I've loaned out several of my YA novels to students, borrowed a book from a student, and ordered Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers. I attended a library-sponsored discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love about three weeks ago and a conference panel on To Kill a Mockingbird more recently. And the Teaching Writing students are writing annotations of picture books, so my head's full of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Stinky Cheese Man, and wondrous books for kids.
There. I've done it. I've admitted to my addiction. Where's my list of those twelve steps, now? Under that pile of books, no doubt.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Voice for First-Year College Students
The power of voice is instantly recognizable in any writing we read. Voice is easy to see, difficult to define, because its very individuality is the point. If it's difficult to define, it's even more difficult to teach. How do you teach uniqueness?
So much of our schooling has drained voice out of our writing. The impersonality of so much "academic" writing, which we are trained to practice, and to value, leaches color from our prose.
As a college student, I aspired to be a writer. I had exploded into poetry in my teens--as so many teens do--and I loved to write. The courses that convinced me that I wasn't a wrter were my Advanced Composition and Journalism courses. I wish I'd never taken them.
I continued writing--I've abandoned my share of novel manuscripts--and I started producing some short stories that I thought were passable and publishable. But I took the wrong direction for a writer: I went back to school--a graduate program in English literature. I certainly enjoyed my Master's program, but reading fourteenth- through seventeenth-century poetry didn't do a whole lot for my writing.
I diverted my generative energies into child-bearing. After two babies, my marriage broke down. I wrote. There's nothing like emotional pain to drive the creative impulse. More short stories!
But needing to support us, I started teaching in the local community colleges. I immersed myself in trying to indoctrinate students in the academic non-voice that I'd mastered myself--students who came with colorful non-academic voices. I used to keep a count of how many classes of first-year writing (I and II) and basic writing (I and II) I'd taught, but I stopped somewhere around 100. Now I'd be hard-pressed to estimate how many students I've tried to teach "academic writing" to.
And now I want to teach voice. The books I love are full of personality--books by Jon Krakauer and Peter Hessler and Azar Nafizi and Elizabeth Gilbert and David Sedaris. The young adult literature I teach would fall flat without strong voices created by Laurie Halse Anderson and M. T. Anderson and Virginia Euwer Wolff and Chris Lynch. Their protagonists follow in the footsteps of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield--so memorable that we feel that we know them personally.
The calm, dispassionate voice deemed suitable for academic argument is, however, a convetion, and it is a convention that students need to adopt for success in upper-level courses. The often flat voice of inexperienced academic writers comes from disengagement in their writing tasks. "Tell me what you want," they demand, "and I'll give it to you. How many pages? How Many sources?" Every time I say, "As many pages as you need to make your point" or "As many reliable sources as you need to make a good case." They put up with it, mostly, because I also meet with them individually and look at evolving drafts, and they end up with the 5-page academic essays that is the goal.
I'm hoping they'll bust open the academic paper in the next couple weeks, though, as we finish our semester with research-based multi-genre papers. They've done enough academic essay writing for the semester, I think. They're certainly engaged right now, as they develop their fictional diary entries, trifold brochures, and PowerPoint presentations incorporating their research. I don't think I'll get any perfunctory writing--but something I'll enjoy reading just as much as I enjoy those books by my favorite stylists.
So much of our schooling has drained voice out of our writing. The impersonality of so much "academic" writing, which we are trained to practice, and to value, leaches color from our prose.
As a college student, I aspired to be a writer. I had exploded into poetry in my teens--as so many teens do--and I loved to write. The courses that convinced me that I wasn't a wrter were my Advanced Composition and Journalism courses. I wish I'd never taken them.
I continued writing--I've abandoned my share of novel manuscripts--and I started producing some short stories that I thought were passable and publishable. But I took the wrong direction for a writer: I went back to school--a graduate program in English literature. I certainly enjoyed my Master's program, but reading fourteenth- through seventeenth-century poetry didn't do a whole lot for my writing.
I diverted my generative energies into child-bearing. After two babies, my marriage broke down. I wrote. There's nothing like emotional pain to drive the creative impulse. More short stories!
But needing to support us, I started teaching in the local community colleges. I immersed myself in trying to indoctrinate students in the academic non-voice that I'd mastered myself--students who came with colorful non-academic voices. I used to keep a count of how many classes of first-year writing (I and II) and basic writing (I and II) I'd taught, but I stopped somewhere around 100. Now I'd be hard-pressed to estimate how many students I've tried to teach "academic writing" to.
And now I want to teach voice. The books I love are full of personality--books by Jon Krakauer and Peter Hessler and Azar Nafizi and Elizabeth Gilbert and David Sedaris. The young adult literature I teach would fall flat without strong voices created by Laurie Halse Anderson and M. T. Anderson and Virginia Euwer Wolff and Chris Lynch. Their protagonists follow in the footsteps of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield--so memorable that we feel that we know them personally.
The calm, dispassionate voice deemed suitable for academic argument is, however, a convetion, and it is a convention that students need to adopt for success in upper-level courses. The often flat voice of inexperienced academic writers comes from disengagement in their writing tasks. "Tell me what you want," they demand, "and I'll give it to you. How many pages? How Many sources?" Every time I say, "As many pages as you need to make your point" or "As many reliable sources as you need to make a good case." They put up with it, mostly, because I also meet with them individually and look at evolving drafts, and they end up with the 5-page academic essays that is the goal.
I'm hoping they'll bust open the academic paper in the next couple weeks, though, as we finish our semester with research-based multi-genre papers. They've done enough academic essay writing for the semester, I think. They're certainly engaged right now, as they develop their fictional diary entries, trifold brochures, and PowerPoint presentations incorporating their research. I don't think I'll get any perfunctory writing--but something I'll enjoy reading just as much as I enjoy those books by my favorite stylists.
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