Tell Me Something Good
Helping Writers Recognize Their Voice
Linnea sat across from me, clutching a new draft of her poems. It was our first writing conference, and I could feel her hesitation, her nervousness.
“So tell me what you are trying to say in this poem.” I finally broke the silence.
“Purpose? Umm…I’m not sure. Maybe to tell you about how much my family means to me, ” she said.
For the next couple of minutes, we continued to discuss and focus her ideas, and I could see her relax as she realized the poem’s purpose was the reliability of her family during struggles. So then we looked at her words, and I asked how she demonstrated this purpose in her poem.
She confidently stated, “With this line… They’ve been with me through ups and downs.”
Huh? What ups and downs? What does that actually mean? And why did she gravitate toward that cliche to describe her experience?
In Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig addresses this same idea as it pertains to essay writing. He discusses a student who struggled to write a descriptive essay that captured the essence of a street in her town. To help her, he encouraged her to focus, first, on a street, then on a building, and finally, to just focus on the upper left brick and working down the building. “She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard… she was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself… without primary regard for what what been said before.” This inability to see beyond the obvious, beyond the hackneyed, is a problem for many writers, and it was Linnea’s problem.
Linnea was writing her poem using language she had heard before and language she imagined summarized her experience. Yet it was unoriginal and certainly not what was in her mind. When I asked her what she meant by ups and down, her face lit up as she babbled details fraught with imagery and emotion. She was, in essence, writing her revised poem in that moment.
Many students unconsciously strive to write the cliche, to write what someone has told them is good — that golden standard of awesomeness, and they do so because schools have educated them to do this for years. Pirsig echoes this by saying, “Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants, you get a bad grade.”
Indeed.
We praise the students who adhere and mimic the golden standard, who can duplicate our idea of what makes a quality piece of writing, and we reward this duplication with strong grades. And I am part of that system, too. However, I want students to reach that same standard, but I want them to do so through innovation. Because when students rely on unoriginal writing, they don’t own the writing, they don’t own their thoughts — many writers before them own those thoughts. Real writing is finding a way to convey ideas authentically, innovatively, through each writer’s unique voice. And isn’t that what the goal is?
So how do I challenge and foster original thought?
I could explain how I encourage students to look at their purpose, how I ask questions to find out what learning they are ready for in that moment, how I push them to be more critical of their own work, or even how I give them immediate feedback for improvement, but in truth, it all comes to one main idea:
I listen to them.
Through hearing their own thoughts, students develop the skills to be reflective, active learners. By developing these skills, students not only clarify their experiences vividly for others, but also foster their understanding of their own thoughts. When we teachers listen to them, we validate the importance of their thoughts and of them understanding their thoughts. For writing is truly our best way to understand the deepest parts of our minds.
