Voice -- Making Your Writing Yours

Voice is one of those really difficult concepts to teach students. I've always explained that voice is what changes your writing from a story written by a student to a story written by YOU. Voice is the way you have of putting together the words to make it your writing.



Then I share my spaghetti sauce recipe. You see, a friend gave me her recipe years ago and we really like it. But I keep tweaking the recipe, adding a little more garlic, using red wine instead of sugar, cooking my special meatballs in the sauce, and so on. Each time I tweak the recipe, I'm changing the recipe to be more mine. In other words, I'm giving the spaghetti my voice.



I love how the cooking discussion makes sense to my students. They talk about their mom's best recipes and how they've tried cooking and so forth. The discussion becomes a concrete example of voice for them.



Then I like to share some picture books with them that have voice. I might start with Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. While this isn't the best of picture books, it's one that I used to read to my son frequently as a young child. Everytime I read it, I cried in recognition of the power of a mother's love. As I tell them about crying, I explain that that's the second part of voice -- it causes an emotional reaction in the reader. Many students are familiar with the story and understand the emotions that the story engenders.

Finally, I like to bring out the big opportunity to understand voice. I read selections from Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, a popular and well-recognized book. There's no mistaking that the story is being told by one person -- Opal, who saves a dog from certain death after being found in the local Winn Dixie grocery story.

This is where the students really begin to understand the concept of voice.

I like to take some bland writing samples and put on the overhead. I show them ways that it can be changed to reflect voice. Then I put another bland writing sample on the board and have the students make suggestions to give it voice. Finally, I give the students a copy of a third piece of bland writing and ask them to work independently on giving it voice.

(I always tell the students this follows the teaching plan of I do it, We do it, the You do it, which makes sense to them.)

While they will still struggle to incorporate voice in their own writing for quite a while longer, I see this lesson as a good introduction and modeling of voice. With frequent reminders over the school year, students will begin to have their own voice in writing soon.