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Please submit your ideas/writing to us via email. We will be working on the draft again this Saturday. Our goal is to have a complete draft to work on with the group the following Monday.

-- Vanessa, Robert & Jolene

OUTLINE (see below for draft article): What is voice? identity of writer identity of character voice and style: How are they similar and different? Natural expressive ability vs. instruction (Can voice be taught?) code switching/voice can change based on purpose, audience, intent

Theoretical underpinnings intertextuality of writing--voice is a compilation of who we are, what we have read/heard/experiences

Fostering student voice (with instructional activities?) Foundational skills/safe environment Finding/expressing identity Using voice as a tool to reach readers Ability to manipulate voice and/or hide author's identity

How do we formatively assess voice? background: what we went through over it challenges (distinctness, skills, assessment tool weaknesses, what else?) our proposals

Examples of assessments rubric activities other assessments

Conclusions

DRAFT: Article on Voice

**What is voice? (JIMMY)** When most of us think of voice in writing, we think of the identity of the writer, the narrator, or the character. But what is it, and how can it be measured? How may an author’s voice be compared or contrasted with his or her style? Can voice be taught? Our group set itself the task of analyzing voice, natural expressive ability versus instruction, code switching (the changing of voice based on purpose, audience, and intent), and how voice can be formatively assessed.

Whenever anyone writes anything, multiple sources are at work. Voice is a compilation of who we are as writers, what we have read, what we have heard, and our internal experiences and epiphanies. The distinctive character of each human being, how individual brains work, is profoundly affected by the culture in which it finds itself. (Shakespeare wrote Elizabethan English because he lived in Elizabethan England.) The reader’s identity and experiences come to bear on the process too. It all comes to a head in the head of our pen or pencil. . . and the eye of the beholder. American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) said, “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” This applies equally if the meeting is through the medium of a text.

**What is the problem?**

The problem we have perceived is that student voice is not being fostered adequately. An individual student voice is lost in the crowd of large class sizes and the conformity of grammar conventions. How can we as educators respond to the needs of our young writers? Our goals were to identify, foster/develop, and evaluate student voice in highly populated classrooms, with initial, formative, and conclusive assessments.

**Theoretical underpinnings**

Our group determined that first and foremost a safe environment is required. No one may write freely, honestly as a person in a setting that causes mental or emotional discomfort, that stifles creativity. We wrestled with the thorny question of conventions, whether they help or hinder voice, and concluded that. . . at times they help, at times they hinder. Group leader Doctor Susan Lenski provocatively stated, “I don’t know that you need to know the rules.” Participant James Doyle asserted, “You just want this writer to be //this writer//. Voice is lost when you become a grammarian.” Participant Rachel Blythe observed, “You teach the proper thing, and then you teach how to bend it.” We generally agreed that knowledge of conventions serves an author’s voice, provides a larger palette from which the writer-artist may choose, while remaining very mindful of the danger of burying voice under conventions. The goal is a self-aware writer making fully-informed choices independently, to serve his or her own creative interests. If the purpose of a writer’s voice is to express his identity, first he or she must find that identity. This is something that the safe environment and the encouragement of parents, peers, and instructors can facilitate in a blossoming writer. The writer’s voice is a tool with which to reach readers, and the more the writer can do with his or her writing, manipulating his or her voice at times, the better he or she will be able to reach and affect readers. “Who are you, and what do you have to say?” is the relevant question here. Also of strong interest to our group was the ability to hide or partially mask voice, as when an author’s writing so completely “assumes the identity” of a narrator or character that authorial voice is impossible to determine, or to take on the voice of someone else. Barbara Kingsolver’s [name of text] was viewed as an example of this: her characters are so strong and so different that more than mere “authorial voice” is present here. **How do we formatively assess voice?** That is the overarching question guiding our discussions and research. The challenges we faced: what determines the distinctness of a writer--what makes him or her unique as a writer? What skills does a writer need to express that which is distinct about him or her? What are the weaknesses of traditional assessment tools and rubrics, some of which provide no definition of voice that may reasonably inform assessment?

**We propose. ..

1. Things Teachers Should Do**

General commentary to introduce the assessments and activities.

**2. Examples of assessments**


 * Need a voice rubric here

3. Examples of Activities (MIRANDA, JOLENE, KRISTINA) **

__(Catherine Kernodle) Read-Aloud Pedagogy: In her work__ Proust and The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain__, professor of child development Maryanne Wolf describes how readers literally internalize their reading voice (a collection of senses) through encountering a writer's voice. This visceral experience occurs for one very important reason: "we were never born to read." (pg.3). The human brain "rearranges" itself to read, activating those aspects of the brain sculpted by evolution to contribute to a reading circuit: genes to neurons to neurological structures to cognitive processes, to behavior. Good readers do a variety of things automatically when reading: we listen, we see, and we connect the text to a variety of thoughts. Many readers describe these encounters in literal terms; according to Wolf, "Machiavelli would sometimes prepare to read by dressing up in the period of the writer he was reading and then setting a table for the two of them." (pg. 7). What Machiavelli sensed internally as a reader – "the sense of encounter" with a writer – he externalized. Like Machiavelli, many students need to internalize these automatic habits of advanced readers: through listening and visualizing. In order for students to say what they mean in their writing, they must read aloud and listen to their paper. In isolation, students struggle to "hear" and realize that their writing has a voice (writing that is meant to say something and be "heard"). Students struggle to approach revision of their writing at any level through silent, isolated or "peer-review" revision work. In order to first externalize the process of reading their own written work, student writers should work in groups of four to voice and revise their papers. The writer "plays" the role I will call the "Sayer," while a second student holds the paper and is "Reader," while the third student is the "Listener" and finally "Recorder" notes revisions based on the dialogue generated. This grouping could provide valuable feedback for a global revision //or// detailed sentence-level revision. The Reader reads the text silently and lets the Sayer know if what they are saying aloud is what they said in the writing. After the Reader notes a discrepency, the Listener would then step in to provide an audience for the Sayer to address. The Listener will encourage the Sayer to explain what they mean to say (may ask global or clarifying questions). The Recorder holds the second copy of the text and writes down quotes from the Sayer and notes she hears come out of the Listener's questioning. other assessments


 * Conclusions **