Daimys – Response for Chapter 5

[Website Services Admin]

#406

Voice is such a difficult thing to explain. I have been teaching writing for a couple of years now, and voice is always the hardest things for students to find…voice is still something difficult for me to find! And the more I teach, the more I give up on ‘teaching voice’ and just assign interesting writing prompts and let students write and rewrite until they come to find their own voice.
I always give the students the example of my writing, and the critique I’ve always gotten in workshops: too much “I”. I always make everything too personal, so while I revise, I try to create some distance in the reading. So, as a group, we work together to find that thing that makes our writing flow, make it an encounter.

This chapter has given me so many things I can have my students write! So many examples I can show to think about voice and the different purposes those voices serve. What I found most helpful was the section “ways in…”. It gives concrete steps to improve voice that can be for anyone from the novice to the experienced. Although this chapter is about writing creative nonfiction, the information can be taken and applied to any type of writing. Voice, even in academic writing, is what moves the reader through the information. Voice is what allows the reader to foster a connection with the writer – allow for the writer to be who they are, whatever flaws that includes. It seems to be the locus of sincere writing – whatever that may mean.

[Sondra Perl]

#474

What kinds of pieces are you workshopping when you get the “too-much-I” critique? This is a really interesting question to me, partly because it’s such a fine line to walk when teaching. It’s a pretty hotly contested subject in terms of the academic essay and I don’t want to mess my students up when they’re writing for other instructors, but I also want them to have opinions and points of view; often “I think this” is better than “no one is saying anything.” But, to get back to your post, how much “I” is too much and in what kinds of writing?

[Website Services Admin]

#602

Maggie, sorry for this crazy late response!
I was in this class that i ‘found’ my academic voice, so I was playing around with I a lot to see what I could get away with in my academic writing. I have found as the my semesters have come and gone, that I actually use a lot of I in my academic writing – and I think people enjoy it because it implicates me in the writing. It doesn’t seem like I’m saying some of the things I say in a vacuum. It also allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally want to generalize in. I think too much I is when it stops being about the reader, and starts being about the writer, at least in academic writing…? Not sure if this helps any!

[Author]

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