Voice

Style is the outer trappings, and voice is even different from language, which is a manifestation of something. But a "voice" is almost without words . . . it's something in the spaces, in between.

--Donald Murray
in Good Advice on Writing by William Safire and Leonard Safir

What an amazing way to describe voice . . . "almost without words." That's the truth, sometimes, isn't it? There's no formula or rules you can give to a student to "teach" how to develop voice. Not to mention that I think voice changes as writers grow and mature. As Elbow pointed out in his essay, different voices are called for in different situations. Students need variety and exposure to different kinds of writing--as well as different kinds of writing assignments. Faigley mentioned the spontaneity of expressive writing, of originality and imagination.

Spontaneity. Freedom of choice. Originality. Creativity. No wonder students have trouble! In a current test happy climate, these are things that are very hard to test in a traditional way. And exposure to a variety of types of writing and types of assignments? Not usually enough time. And if we allow variety, they how will we standardize?

I can't help but wonder if we're setting our students up to hate writing and fail at finding their voice and their niche. After years of writing the same way and for the same ends (i.e. the test), it's no wonder they can't find their voice--and, I think then, a comfort level with writing. Macrorie's concept of Engfish was funny and yet sad at the same time . . . how many of us can remember writing something the way we thought it should sound because that's what a teacher wanted? Most of us, I'm sure, broke away from that and found our own voices . . . or are actively trying to. How many students do the same? I loved the quote he included from Nietzsche

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

Spot on. If you've watched young children play, create, write--anything they do really, you can see how they become totally immersed in what they are doing. When they play dog, they are the dog. When they paint, they are an artist. And when they write (on their own and not in school), they usually write what they want and how they want to without any thought to what others may think of their writing. They have their writer's voice.

Sadly, I think that the way writing is prescribed in school chips away at that voice instead of building it up. To build up, they need to read good writing, practice good writing, and experiment with finding their voice and making it work for the situation called for. But that all takes time, freedom, trust, and creativity. Not exactly easy to come by in a standardized, test-crazed educational environment.

That's where our job comes in as teachers of writing. To make sure we fit those things into our classrooms any way we can . . . to blend what we know about process with what is required with regard to task.

Ah, "The Space Between." While I realize Dave Matthews is most likely not talking about Murray's concept of writer's voice here, the images he creates of what's found in the space between reminded me of writer's voice. Plus, it's Dave Matthews. There's nothing like a little Dave Matthews on a Monday morning.



Or any time for that matter.

The Icing Before the Cake

This section from Rohman and Welcke jumped out at me:

There is no one philosophy of writing; consequently there can be no one method to teach it. There is no one form of writing appropriate to all occasions conceivable for writing; so there can be no one method that will equip a student in detail for each subsequent writing occasion. The most that can be done, it seems to us, is frankly to state your philosophy of writing, and within those frontiers establish whatever methodological and pedagogical laws seem appropriate. (221)

As far as I'm concerned, they nailed it. It seems so logical--learn about the different theories, test out methods, get to know your students, and do whatever it takes to inspire them and guide them in their writing. Equip teachers with the resources they need (and I don't think they are necessarily ones that cost much) and give them the freedom and trust to do the right thing. Realize that until students feel comfortable writing and getting their ideas on paper, teaching them different forms and kinds and forcing them to follow checklists and outlines may only hurts their writing--and their thoughts about writing. It's kind of like baking a cake . . . you don't put the icing on until the cake is completely cooled or else you'll get crumbs all over it and possibly rip the cake apart.

My daughter sat down with me the other day when they were home from school, and I asked her to write a story about our trip to the Farm Show. I told her to just tell me about the Farm Show, and I would write it down as she spoke--a freewrite, really, except that I was her scribe. This is what she "wrote":

What I Like about the farm show is getting milkshakes, seeing dogs perform, and seeing all the animals, even the cute little piggies. I also liked getting the delicious food there. And I had a roast beef sandwich. I like vanilla milkshakes. I loved climbing on the equipment and going in the big tire. And I like playing on the playground. The slide was super fast!

Not too bad for a first grader! She's got some form, some details, and used some adjectives. She doesn't know what those are, but she doesn't need to. At this point, if I told her what an adjective was and how they help show instead of tell, she might focus on making sure she had enough adjectives--follow a formula if you will--instead of just letting her writing flow naturally from her. Also, if I had had her physically write it, it would have look much different as I think she would have gotten physically tired of writing before she got all her thoughts down. I wonder if younger students who just don't yet have the motor skills to write as quickly as they think get frustrated and then turn out writing that is not necessarily what is in their heads. And then to have to write whole paragraphs of it? No wonder many students grow to hate writing or think they aren't any good at it.

My point is that she has thoughts in her head. She can put them together logically. She told me to add the exclamation point at the end because she wanted to show that it was really fast. Are there things that could be changed to make it flow a bit better? Of course. But that will come in time. The important thing for her is that she was able to get her thoughts down on paper (or computer screen) and see how the words helped her thoughts take shape. That was the cake. She's got plenty of time for the icing.

Yet it seems that we rush students into the icing. Already I see her so concerned with her spelling and neatness--it is not something I have ever encouraged in her writing, and I see that it makes the writing she physically writes much shorter and less detailed. Part of that is age, I'm sure . . . she is only in first grade. But when she "writes" out loud, so much more comes out. My hope is that as she ages, those ideas and details are squelched by having writing methods forced on her that don't fit her way of writing.

That's my hope for any student--that he or she can write and feel comfortable with writing and have the ability to be creative. While I believe that structured writing, outlines, prewriting tools, and editing have their places (I'm a HUGE proponent of solid and thorough grammar instruction actually), I think they also have their times. Remember: you can't ice the cake until it's cool (even though you may REALLY want to eat it). Students are being asked to do too much of the wrong thing too early. As Sir Ken Robinson pointed out in his video, we are discouraging creativity and thought in the name of efficiency and test performance.

And sorry about the cheesy cake metaphor . . . am craving cake ;).

Shakespearean Sonnet cake by Jennifer; found at http://www.gingerbread-house-heaven.com/shakespearean-sonnet-cake.html

Foundations of Education in a Nutshell

I loved this video we watched in class. Not only does it align fairly well with my personal educational philosophy, but it sums up in 11 minutes everything I studied last semester in Curriculum Foundations. Well, almost everything.

Revising: Peer Editing

I am a huge propent of peer conferencing and editing. I think it's crucial that my students have others read their writing and give feedback--though at the middle school level, this can often be hit or miss. As such, I usually provided a handout to guide the editors through the conferencing process--encouraging them to develop their skills at providing meaningful feedback and not just circling all the misspelled words.

I usually had students peer conference in pairs. Sometimes I assigned them, and sometimes I let them choose--it often depends on the type of writing and the relationships in the class. These relationships often fluctuatte, as anyone who has ever taught, parented, or observed preteens knows . . . sometimes just from the start of class to the end!

I believe heavily in developing a community of learners in my classroom. I am intrigued to read more Elbow and Bruffee--as Hairston pointed out in "The Winds of Change," "they [teachers] have no way of knowing that their students might benefit far more from small group meetings with each other than from the exhausting one-to-one conferences that the teachers hold." I realize that the one-to-one conferences that Hairston references are teacher/student, but I think they could probably apply to student/student conferences as well. I'd be interested to see how it would work to set up small critique groups that change maybe only a few times a year that students would conference it and get ideas from--once the logistics were worked out. Paul Deising (in Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences as quoted in Stephen North's introduction to The Making of Knowledge in Composition) describes just the kind of community I think small writing groups in the larger community of the class as a whole would reflect:

A community is located by finding people  who interact regularly with one another in their work. They read and use each other's ideas, discuss each other's work, and sometimes collaborate . . . Although they do not use exactly the same procedure in their work, there is a great deal of similarity, and the differences are accepted as variant realizations of the same values. 

Processing the Process

I like this model of the writing process . . . it's not very linear and shows more of an interactive relationship between the different steps.

It has been almost eight years since I left the classroom to stay home and rear my children. While those years seemed to pass in an instant, as I've begun the process of transitioning back into student/teacher/professional mode, I've realized how much education has changed. Not necessarily for the better either.

As I read through the readings today, I tried to think about whether or not I taught composition or writing--as I think there is a difference. Using the model of the writing process, I had all my seventh graders brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, editing, and publishing. Most of my students were comfortable with this linear process . . . or perhaps they were resigned to it, being taught to write that way for most of their fairly short academic lives. Yet there were students who had trouble with the process. Hesitant to "go against the flow," I often tried to get them to go through the writing process and often found myself dissapointed with the results.

I believe in modeling for students, so when they wrote, I wrote. And I found myself, at times, uncomfortable with the knowledge that I myself felt constricted and frustrated with the writing process. Doing most of my writing directly on a PC, I was content to dive in and write my draft, editing as I went and doing multiple drafts on the computer. I often skipped the prewriting and brainstorming because it didn't serve me well. I'm sure it was lack of experience and confidence in myself that didn't allow my students the same privelege.

Only once can I remember encouraging students not to follow the process. So many of them were having trouble writing introductory paragraphs--they were finding that as they'd write through their piece, it would turn into something totally different by the end. I don't like writing introductions either, so I suggested to them to just dive in and write--come back and do the introduction last. They were stunned that I would tell them to do so, and it was a technique that helped quite a few of them as they stared at the page, struggling with the introduction.

Maybe the writer's block was necessarily caused by the evil pencils but by a linear process that doesn't always work with non-linear writers?

I thought of this after reading Steven Lynn's thoughts on Process when he quotes Peter Elbow in Writing without Teachers: "Only at the end will you know what you want to say or the words you want to say it with."

I like the idea of a more cyclical rather than linear writing process. Lynn mentions the importance of constant revision and holding off grading . . . not always practical in the modern classroom but a worthy goal. Before, I graded students at the "end" of the process--their final draft. Yet that clashed with what I always told them, that writers aren't ever really done writing . . . often, there is always something they can find that they can improve or change or expand on. Going back, I'm wondering if a compromise would be to allow students to further revise their "final" copy and hand it back in for another grade (within a certain time frame). 

In his introduction to The Making of Knowledge in Composition, Stephen North quotes Paul Dessing on his approach to teaching writing, "Anyone who discusses method must eventually face the question of what his method is." I think it's crucial for me to be aware that not all of my students are going to have the same method . . . . and that by offering a more cyclical or personally modified writing process, I may make writing more inspiring and approachable to students.