As a former student teaching supervisor, I once observed a frustrated young English teacher conferring with a student over a research paper, wherein the voice was dry as dust. The problem, of course, was not the student; it was the student’s approach to the assignment. He assumed all argumentative essays were dull and should end with the death of the reader from boredom.
“This piece is factually correct, but there’s no voice in it,” she said. The student looked at her blankly.
“That’s because it’s written and not spoken,” he said with complete sincerity.
Voice is one of those writing elements that bedevils most teachers because, like obscenity, we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it. I don’t “teach” voice as much as I ask students to understand their thinking around a topic. Bearing witness to one’s own position on controversial topics often infuses essays with the necessary spizzerinctum that lends to voice.
When writing happens in the wild (outside the classroom), students don’t have to conjure up a voice. They have a voice that is natural and tuned by the subject they’re writing about with an attitude they already possess. Their text messages, their IG posts, their jokes, their micro-arguments in a text thread with their parents - all that voice is defined by the rhetorical situation they find themselves in.
We first analyze the voice of mentor texts, like Lynda Barry’s “The Sanctuary of School” which argues for funding the arts in public school and Jennifer Rich’s “A Second Grader Once Pointed a Gun at Me” which argues against arming teachers with guns. And then we discuss how voice in nonfiction is formed, how close the speaker is to the subject, to their audience, to their message. We talk about how all the writerly decisions -of syntax, of diction, of rhythm - impact and are impacted by the voice of the writer. Readers lean into an honest voice, one with a likable and understandable quality to it, one who is measured, one who has done the work to present ideas clearly.
When students are struck by an urgency to write something, I urge them to assess their rhetorical situation, particularly ‘who are you?’ Not ‘who are you?’ as a definitive biography, but who, among the different personas that you carry around with you, will be writing this, from what experience will you be drawing your voice, what element of your personality/experience will be in the foreground.
I ask students to draw a pie with twelve-twenty slices in their writing notebooks. In those slices, I ask them to declare their various personas or selves. My circle includes teacher, writer, wife, gardener, Kentuckian, American citizen, Gen Xer, Taurus, Enneagram 3, white, middle-aged, middle-class, cisgender female. In my capacity as a substacker, I draw on my expertise and passion as a teacher of writers and as a writer myself. I want the voice in this newsletter to be friendly, accessible, credible, informal, yet engaging. I don’t have to inject that voice; I write with these predispositions already in place. I imagine you, my dear readers, and I find my voice without straining too much.
My student Savannah has decided she wants to write a narrative argument about the need for universal health care in the United States. Her ongoing medical history serves as the spine on which this argument is built. As someone who has been suffering from an undiagnosed throat malady that has plagued her since the spring, she’s been tested by allergists, internists, neurologists, and pulmonologists. She’s had to endure antibiotics, steroids, allergy tests, MRIs, X-rays, and a battery of psychological evaluations. All the while, she watches as her worried, working-class parents are sitting at the kitchen table every night with a mounting pile of medical bills. It shouldn’t be this way is her point. Why is it this way is her controlling question.
In the first draft of her essay, her voice was strident, sarcastic, angry, at times mocking, at times raging; after her classmates commented that she needed to temper the rage to convince her audience of the merits of her argument, she leveled out to a more measured voice, arguing for sensible legislation which could help her family and other families like hers who are suffering.
If students are having trouble with voice in their writing, ask them to meta-write about the writing to see if these queries help:
Why are you writing this?
Who are you to write this?
What’s your point?
Why should anyone care?
What unique perspective are you bringing to the page that no one else could bring?
What is your attitude toward the subject you are writing about?
How do you “sound” as you write? How does the reader “hear” you?