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.