Using Voice in Student Writing
You want the students to be exposed to these resources so they will find a variety of technique and style of how to portray voice in fiction writing. The above references and quotes should serve two purposes. One is to give students a variety of examples of good writing that characterize voice. The second purpose is to get students interested in these books enough so that they want to pick them up from the shelf and read the story for themselves. These quotes, or any you use from books you are particularly fond of, should captivate the students and entice them to read the story on their own. "When readers hear a voice in a piece of writing, they are often more drawn to read it—and that audible voice often makes the words easier to understand." 14
There are many writing assignments that can come from a unit on voice. As I begin to explore the venue of teaching writing I know that getting students to write in a voice other than their own is a worthwhile and fundamental task. That's not to say that writing assignments where students write from their own voice are not going to happen in my classroom. Of course it will. However, in this unit I wanted to ask students to put themselves in someone else's shoes and write from that perspective. Not a new concept, I know, but one that needs to be present in a Language Arts class if we want our students to become stronger and more diversified writers.
Allowing the student to place himself into the mind of a character is the first step he needs to take. One way of doing this is to ask the student to react to various situations as if he were the character. For instance, ask the student to put himself into the situation described in The Taking of Room 114, one in which he is being held hostage by the teacher. Just like the students in the novel he can only write in poem form. Ask the student to write a brief poem about what he is experiencing right at that moment he is taken hostage. The poem will probably be very revealing.
Another way of exploring voice in writing is through dialogue. Asking students to put themselves into the shoes of a fictional character and then take it further and write a dialogue between two fictional characters is a challenging but gratifying task. Once students can nurture the imagination and creativeness it takes to be a writer, the writing will become so much more rich and appealing. Take for instance a writing assignment in which Steve McDaniel (Stuck in Neutral) and Naomi León (Becoming Naomi León) have a conversation about parents. This can lead to a variety of paths the student could take. It gives the student a starting place; however, there is no one avenue in which the conversation is destined to go. That would be up to the creative imagination of the student. In addition, it would also be up to the interpretation of the character through the eyes of the student as to where the conversation travels.
A further writing strategy would be to fill in the missing dialogue of a text. For instance, the second poem presented above for The Taking of Room 114 give the reader the voice of just one character. However, it is clear there is more than one character present in the conversation. A student could be asked to write the voice of the unheard character. There are several ways for this assignment to create itself using various texts. Even stories in which both voices are heard, the student could be given a copy of a portion of the text with just one voice presented and another student could be given the text with the other voice. Separately each student could begin to fill in the missing voice. Afterward they could compare their dialogues and see if there were any commonalities.
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