On Writing: Give Them A Voice

Writing takes a leap of faith.  It takes courage and conviction to grab someone by the shirt front and get in his face and say:  “Listen to me!  Read what I have written!  I have something to say to the world!”  This is writerly courage.  When picking up the pen, the writer must brave the fire.  What if the writing generates an angry response?  What if someone wants to disagree with the thesis, or wants to argue a point?  A writer must believe in the power of her own voice; in fact, she must believe she has a voice.

The students I encounter as a writing consultant are not empowered to see their writing as a voice.  They lack faith in themselves and their abilities.  They are intimidated and scared.  I really feel for them and their plight.  Ten years ago, they used to show up in my office with a draft which we would review and revise together.  Now, any actual writing is rare.  They have the assignment and the rubric—rubrics are still big these days.  Yet, they have no idea where to begin.  They cannot compare their work to the rubric and know that their writing meets the standards of the course.

One freshmen composition student came to my office with an assignment to write about what reminds her of home.  She did, actually, have a partial draft and a good idea.  She opened her essay talking about a durian, the spiky, rotten-garbage-smelling fruit with the sweet, custard-like flesh.  This controversial delicacy, a staple of southeast Asian cuisine, always reminded this student of her childhood home in Thailand.  I asked her why it reminded her of home, and what she said solidified her essay for me.  The places we call home have both positive and negative impacts on our lives and are often a bittersweet note that, nonetheless, as we look back, makes us feel nostalgic.  The durian is the perfect metaphor for this.  A fruit of contradictions:  ugly thorns on the outside, an off-putting smell, yet rich and sweet on the inside.  Thailand:  politically unstable at times with an emerging economy is also rich and vibrant in culture and traditions.

We went back and forth developing the metaphorical connections in the piece.  I kept urging the student, as Charles Dickens said, to make me see.  I have never been to Thailand, I told her, but I wanted her to take me there in her essay.  As we worked, I could see her growing confidence in her writing.  The ideas were flowing.  English was not her first language, and I realized she was thinking in her native tongue and translating her ideas into her adopted language on the page.  This led to some awkwardness but I also noticed it made some of her lines more poetic.

For that hour, I focused on encouraging her voice.  I did correct some basic grammar errors, but I avoided focusing too much on mechanics and syntax because I did not want to restrict the flow of ideas.

When her instructor returned her paper, he praised her use of the durian metaphor structure as well as the poetry in some of the sentences.  He did catch every one of her mechanical errors.  So in our second hour together, we worked through those issues and I explained the error and we revised together.

It is my belief that if we started with the grammar and syntax errors, or focused on the MLA formatting her professor required for the final draft, the student would have become too self-conscious and we would have frozen her voice.  Once we had a draft, then we could work on mechanics.  If we free the student’s voice, if we help her grow confident using that voice, we can revise the mechanical errors later.

Another English teacher I know spends the entire semester with his freshmen English class focusing on diagramming sentences and memorizing the names and rules of the parts of speech.  He is obsessed with this and believes fervently that this will make his students better writers.  To be fair, he does assign papers, but his focus is clearly on mechanics and the technical aspects of writing, not on content.  Having worked with his students, I find their writing flat and lifeless.  When they come into my office, they want to know what grammar errors they made, not if their thesis or content had an impact on me as a reader.  Their papers are sometimes technically good, but devoid of nuance or insight or passion.  They are not, to put it bluntly, very creative.  This teacher upped the ante by coming to me with a proposition:  I would review each page of a student’s essay, and when it was free of mechanical errors, regardless of the content, I should sign each page at the bottom.  Then his grading would be more efficient and easy because he would know right away if the student observed the proper rules of grammar simply by my signature on each page.

First, I told him I was not his teaching assistant.  Furthermore, I felt he was missing the point of a freshmen composition course, which is to get students to write frequently, give them feedback on content and, yes, mechanics, but more importantly, the teacher should give them a voice and encourage them to use it.  After this, he made my formerly required meetings with his students optional.  Diagramming sentences makes for interesting geometry but I’m not sure it makes college-level students better writers.  Writing all the time and getting constant encouragement and critical feedback makes better writers.  Students learn by doing.

There is one other glaring issue here:  students are not reading enough writers with a strong voice; in my informal and unscientific poll taken in numerous workshops and developmental skills courses I’ve taught, they are not reading much at all.  Ten years ago, I saw students reading novels, short story collections, anthologies of essays around campus.  Now I see students reading textbooks, which is fine, but that is reading for facts.  Textbooks are written by committee.  They are developed to have no voice and instead, focus on conveying information.  What about imaginative literature?  What about reading for different purposes, or for ideas, opinions, and personal experiences?  Where is the modeling of what an essay can do?  And this reading should be across the curriculum; every academic department must teach writing, not just English.  (As I write this in the cafeteria, I see one student reading a novel and another reading a book of essays, but these are exceptions.)

Students need reading experience with all kinds of texts.  Informed readers make better writers.  The internet and our various tools to access it have flattened the contextual landscape of cultural literacy.  Everything is equal in this brave new world leaving students without the knowledge of proper sources or even an understanding of the differences between a general interest publication and an academic journal.

Recently, a group of faculty and staff members on campus collected and analyzed data on our students’ cultural and informational literacy.  Across the board, students struggled “to find, retrieve, evaluate and use information effectively and ethically.”  The students also had a problem “recognizing the different types of sources, especially online sources.”  The committee concluded that “students should have more training/instruction around information literacy,” and this literacy should be extended across the curriculum and disciplines.  Students should be encouraged to use the library more and become skilled at finding and utilizing the information in their writing.

This all goes to the heart of developing good writers:  give them an informed voice.  Their writing is necessary to the world, and the act of composition begins with voracious, broad reading both for information and to see how other writers utilize their voices.  Only then will these developing writers hear the echoes of literature in their own work.  Grammar and syntax are tools to communicate effectively, and therefore developing those skills is critical.  But let’s begin with encouraging students to have a voice and to use it.  I tell my students, “Have something to say.  Say it well.  And be courageous.”