American Voices: Listening to Fiction, Poetry, and Prose

Strategies

Then how does one teach personality and intonation? Gradually and cumulatively. Start reading literature in which there is a definite voice. Identify how the writer accomplished this feat and try it. Listen to the voices around you. How does she portray her personality through communication? Experiment with the same strategies. Consider if that technique fit your personality and then try another strategy. Thus, writing with voice is taught through multiple exposures to good writing, the writing process, writing traits, and metacognition.

Guided Comprehension Modeling

Learning to read and write takes little explicit instruction in the middle and upper grades. Instead students must be exposed to good literature and try to mimic the techniques with guidance until they feel proficient at performing them alone. This model of teaching is called guided comprehension. Initially, teachers model the desired skill. Then students assist the teacher through the process. Next, the teacher assists the students, but the students are initiating most of the action. Finally, the students work independently. In this manner, students are given a goal and accomplish it, supported through practice until they are skillful users of whatever is taught.

Reading Strategies

Since I must teach both reading and writing in one period, I will combine my initial instruction of the six strategies that expert readers use with the examination and production of voice in writing. I have found most helpful in combining the instruction of reading and writing a method called "Read like a Reader; Read like a Writer." ¹⁶ This process helps analyze the production of voice in a piece of literature because students interact with the writing multiple times. Through this process students look at a piece of literature as a reader: connecting, predicting, inferring, questioning, and evaluating the piece. Then students reexamine the writing through the eyes of a fellow author. In order to do this, Peha recommends that the composition to be analyzed be in the middle of the page with the left margin delineated for the students' reflections acting as a reader and the right margin for the students' reflections acting as a writer. Because I don't like wasting paper and the students each have a textbook of their own, we forgo the middle column and just use our textbook and a piece of notebook paper. To adapt the method, students fold their paper in half lengthwise and write the six reading strategies in the margin on the left (connecting, feeling, predicting, inferring, questioning and evaluation) and the six traits of writing (organization, details, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions and voice) in the right margin (see Appendix A).

During my instruction in September, I reintroduce the students to the six strategies of expert readers in steps. By the end of my first reading unit, students implement the six reading strategies proficiently and independently. The examination of the six traits of writing will similarly be in stages; however, for the first unit, the students only analyze voice techniques. Word choices, sentence formation, organization, development of ideas and use of conventions all create voice. It isn't a trait in isolation, but I will not give explicit instruction on the other traits. This will be an introduction to the other traits through the component voice. With this in mind, the unit seems to naturally fall into the first trimester.

Writing Process

Peha indicates that voice comes into the writing process at the earliest stage. In the pre-writing phase, voice enters with "passion for topic, strong feelings, honesty, personality, [and] control." ¹⁷ The rest of the six traits of writing (i.e. organization, development, sentence fluency, word choice and conventions) Peha asserts, will flow naturally from there. ¹⁸

Experts on writing and voice indicate later parts of the writing process are crucial. Elbow advocates writing the first draft without stopping to self-analyze: voice enters at the second stage. This decreases the likelihood of interrupting the unconscious flow of self. In this manner the first draft has the most authentic voice. He further recommends only revising for punctuation: punctuate only where it is necessary for natural breathing patterns. Read the piece aloud and hear the phrasing. ¹⁹

In "Theme for English B," Langston Hughes's teacher makes the same assertion. "Go home and write/ a page tonight./ And let that page come out of you-/ Then, it will be true." ²⁰ Hughes's student speaker disagrees and asserts that voice is the combination of all one comes in contact with in their life, even if the association is not altogether desired. "I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:/ hear you, hear me - we two - you, me, talk on this page." ²¹ And a few lines farther:

    So will my page be colored that I write?
    Being me, it will not be white.
    But it will be
    a part of you, instructor.
    You are white-
    yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
    That's American.
    Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
    Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
    But we are, that's true!
    As I learn from you,
    I guess you learn from me-
    although you're older- and white-
    and somewhat more free.
  

This is my theme for English B. ²²

I believe that the trait of voice is crucial in all steps of the writing process, not just the prewriting and first draft stage. The difference is the relationship between writer, composition and audience at each stage. The relationship between the writer and the literature is prominent in the prewriting and first draft phases. The relationship between the writer and the reader is foremost in the revision and editing steps. And the reader and the composition relationship prevails in the publishing/presentation stage. This makes the process and instruction of writing with voice very difficult because each phase has a different focus.

Six Traits of Writing

Various authors depict their own explorations for a distinct voice through their memoirs. As Julia Alvarez searched for her voice as a Latina American, she described reading and copying the masters and then feeling that this was inauthentic. She learned their techniques and used those that fit but actually found most of her own style in the women in her life. This supports Hughes's assertion that one's voice is a combination of all in whom one comes in contact. Piecing together the techniques of the masters and people who felt truest to herself, Alvarez discovered her own voice. ²³

I was reminded of the lessons I had learned in childhood: that my voice would not be found up in a tower, in those upper reaches or important places, but down in the kitchen among the women who first taught me about service, about passion, about singing as if my life depended on it. ²⁴

Have students listen to the voices around them and in literature. Have them copy the techniques and find what feels like their personality and keep using it. Allow them to write about thing that are important and have meaning for them so that they might have enthusiasm and authority about the topic. Make them see that writing is a form of self-expression and communication with a reader. In this way students will find their voice.

Metacognition

Crucial in the exploration of self and the production of a voice is the examination of what is and what is not true for an individual. The only way I know of being overt and thoughtful in this process is to use a written form of metacognition. ²⁵ After each component of this unit, student will be writing in a journal about the techniques they used, how they used them and whether or not the strategy fit who they think they are. Since there are three distinct sections to my unit, I plan to use a tetra-tetra-flexagon: a book made of one folded piece of paper that opens and unfolds into three pairs of facing pages and a cover. ²⁶ The first pair of pages will be used for the narrative piece, the second for the memoir and the final for the personal persuasive statement.

I highly encourage teachers to go through this process with their students and share with them some dimensions of how their own voice developed and changed through life's experiences. ²⁷