When Worlds Collide
The challenge of encouraging student voice in academic writing
I watch as my English 9 students trickle into the classroom:
“Huzzah!” Jeremy says as he enters the classroom, walking to his tablemates with his hands in the air. They return his self-announced arrival with doubtful glances.
“Huzzah?” Chloe questions. “What does that even mean?”
“I dunno. It’s just a Huzzah moment.” Chloe shakes her head and rolls her eyes.
“No. Way,” Elise responds to Zaria with a shocked, wide-eyed look. Then–as Zaria’s juicy news sinks in–a smile emerges on Elise’s face: “No way no way no way no way no way!” The girls collapse into giggles.
“Mrs. Carothers,” Rob says as he approaches me, “Are we going to write poems today?” Rob always wants to write poems.
“Maybe,” I say.
“Can I lead the class in a poetry lesson sometime?”
“Absolutely! We need to make that happen.” As Rob returns to his seat, I mentally scan the day’s lesson for a poetic opportunity.
This group of 9th graders is a delight. So vibrant. The essence of their worlds can’t help but spill into our classroom. The atmosphere is ripe for playing with words and bringing voice into their writing–my way to help students maintain a little human-ness in this world of ChatGPT and GrammarlyGO.
Voice is a tricky, nebulous concept. Keeping it simple, I’ve told them a writer’s voice conveys their attitude about a subject or their overall personality without directly stating it. My students have reduced this to, “Convey it, don’t say it.” To help develop their understanding, over the past couple weeks we’ve been examining writers’ voices in excerpts pulled from stories, news articles, text messages, and ad copy. Even though they’ve struggled to label the voice of a piece (we’ve eventually gotten there through their round-about descriptions), they’ve identified a few aspects of writing that help deliver the writer’s voice: Word choice, sentence and paragraph length, and punctuation.
I’m eager to build on these discussions and to see them convey voice in their own writing. I’ve decided to start with word choice.
We wrap up our discussion of Doris Lessing’s story, “Through the Tunnel” and transition into our obligatory unit on subject-verb agreement.
“Oh, yay for grammar,” Jeremy quips, and his tone indicates verbs are not his idea of Huzzah.
But they could be.
After we take a few notes about those tricky singular subjects and practice picking grammatically correct verbs through a team competition (Hey, a little pandering now and then doesn’t hurt), I double down on the power of verbs.
I remind them of our focus on developing our writer’s voices and share a few examples of how verbs can express attitude as well as action. They have fun “verbing” how their friends, teachers, or celebrities enter a room. They one-up each other:
Mr. Morningside sneaks into the room….
No, Mr. Morningside creeps into the room…
No, Mr. Morningside slithers….
They soon see how they can live up to their “Convey it, don’t say it” mantra. It’s a simple activity, but I want to leverage it. After all, they’ve just been informally shouting out ideas.
I direct the students to their Voice Practice document, an ongoing assignment in Schoology that’s little more than a series of boxes in a Google Doc. On the whiteboard I write, “The parakeet was excited.”
“Write a better version of this sentence,” I tell them. “Express your attitude about birds. Change the verb. Actually, you can change or add any words as long as your sentence shows a bird that’s excited.” I pause and look at Rob. “You can even write a poem.”
They begin typing immediately and smile and chuckle. Elise raises her hand and asks, “Can I add a simile?” My heart leaps. Wow, I think. This is easy! So when I have a moment later that afternoon, I eagerly check their parakeet sentences.
They suck.
The parakeet squealed excitedly.
The parakeet sat on its perch.
And I guess Elise decided against adding a simile “The parakeet ran around.” Ran?
Even Rob the poet disappointed: “The parakeet is happy.” Et tu, Rob?
Aaaaahhh! Someone please shoot this parakeet!
Clearly the lesson hasn’t landed. But I have to figure out why not.
When we talk about it during the next class, they share that they like the writing activities and are glad learning grammar isn’t as boring as they thought it would be. They are surprised, however, when I say I can’t hear their voices in their writing.
“Well, I changed the verb,” Chloe says.
“Yeah,” says Jeremy. “I thought that’s all we were supposed to do…Was this for points?”
The game of school is ingrained by 9th grade. George Costanza didn’t want his worlds colliding either. Is that what’s happening here? Do my 9th graders think their true opinions and emotions, their loves and turmoils aren’t allowed in the world of school…even after I’ve told them that’s part of the writer’s voice we’re working on? I fear, to them, a school assignment requires a school voice. A teacher-accepted voice. An easy-to-interpret voice. The right voice.
I can’t blame them for this hesitancy. Our curriculum does not directly address developing a writer’s voice. I must carve out time for it. But there’s no poetry or narrative writing either. The focus is on reading literature, discussing literature, and writing thesis-driven essays about literature.
Is this a fool’s errand? I wonder.
It would be easier to give up this focus on writer’s voice… It’s not a part of our required curriculum… No one would know if I abandoned it…which would free up time for helping my students get their theme statements right and their subject-verb agreement right and their pronoun case right and their essay structures….right…
And there it is. Like a parakeet that has narrowly dodged a bullet, my heart’s aflutter; all the reasons why I set out to focus on writer’s voice with my freshmen rush back to me.
When we focus solely on the “right” way to write, treating voice and creativity as extra or optional, students can’t help but focus on the product, the thing that gets them the points or the grade or the gold star. Guess what AI does well: grammatically correct, content-driven writing. So when GrammarlyGO’s magic pencil button pops up, we can’t be surprised if they click it.
To our students it must feel more efficient to bypass all that thinking, all that struggle, all that mess that comes with writing. Of course, as educators, we know that’s where the best learning happens.
Guess what AI doesn’t do well: voice. GrammarlyGO, however, does have an array of “tones” to select, so I asked it to write parakeet sentences too.
They sucked.
Wow, the parakeet seems to be bursting with joy! (Inspirational tone)
Wow, the parakeet is absolutely thrilled! (Engaging tone)
The parakeet exudes a contagious sense of excitement. (Exciting tone)
Even if GrammarlyGO could write with a convincing voice, it wouldn’t be my students’ voices. Only they can provide that.
By prioritizing writer’s voice and helping my students find and develop it, I’m keeping them in that place of learning where they can also experience how the process of matching language to ideas can help them figure out what they actually think.
This is the ongoing challenge of English teachers–to connect what we read and write and discuss to our students. To elevate their voices. In a world full of noise, our students need a place they can hear themselves for a change.
As I sit here typing the last lines of this post, I’m not sure how I’ll make room for the poetry and the Huzzahs of my students’ writing voices. But even as I hear, “No way no way no way no way,” I know that there is.
DISCLAIMER: No parakeets were harmed during my class or during the writing of this blog post.
