Finding Your Writer's Voice

“What Do I Write?”; “Can You Give Us a Prompt?”; “How Are We Going to Be Graded?”; “I Don’t Have Anything to Say.”

Just a few short weeks ago, these were the questions flying around the classroom as most of you grumbled and worried about what to write, what to do, what to say in your blog.  Many of you expressed fear and trepidation about “putting yourself out there”. Some of you asked about privacy issues and wanted to somehow disguise the writer behind the writing.

However, now that you have your projects up and running, you are finding your writer’s voice and slowly emerging with your public persona.

You’ve learned that you can write personally without being personal; you can write about personal interests without revealing your personal identity. So, all of this begs the question of “What is your writer’s voice?”

On his blog “Men with Pens”,  James writes “When you’re a writer or a blogger, you’re putting your voice out there. It’s a lot like standing on stage singing your heart out for all the world to see”.  James then continues with an insightful discussion of how writers often  “write in a voice that they feel they should use – but their writing voice usually comes off sounding stiff and generic”

On a more academic level, in “Looking for Quality in Student Writing”, Steve Peha offers some practical advice:

“The trick is in letting that voice come through. And the only way that happens is if we make different choices in our writing than other writers make in theirs, choices that reflect who we are inside — our original thoughts and personal feelings, our particular way of seeing things and interpreting them — and writing it all down.