Deanna Davis: Looking for My Voice

Looking for My Voice

According to Bartholomae in his article "Inveting the University" and quoted in Crick's "Composition as Experience," "The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community." In other words, to write in the academy a student must adapt a persona, they must adopt a voice that is not thier own to express ideas that are their own.This can really pose problems when a student is asked to write a paper as if the audience knows nothing about the subject, when the student knows for a fact that the audience -- the teacher or professor -- knows more about the subject than the student does. The student is caught between a rock and a hard place, not knowing how much detail to include without sounding patronizing, while still seeming like they have a mastery of their subject.

I recall an assignment I did in for LIT 2030, it was to write a paper analyzing the sounds in a specific poem. For the assignment I chose Ogden Nash's whimsical poem "The Tale of Custard the Dragon." I approached the assignment by analyzing it line by line for the auditory cues and explaining how the sounds worked together to make a cohesive poem. The biggest challenge in composing the paper was was trying to write out sounds, to make the auditory visual while still adhereing to strict academic strictures. I manuvered around the problem by approaching it as a scholar. by not letting the silliness of the sounds I was writing get ahold of me, but remain professional. However, another, more serious issue reared its ugly head. We were to use terms defined in class, but since they were defined in class, did I have to define them in the paper? It was difficult since I had to use definite terms like "ballad" and "euphonious sound," that were defined clearly in class and in the text, and still reiterate them in my assignment while making them sound natural.

I got caught in the trap of my own academic writing persona and could not figure out how to speak. Did I speak as a teacher, as if I was teaching my audience? Did I speak as a student, asserting a thesis and defending it? If I was a teacher, who was I teaching since my audience was also a teacher? It was a difficult conundrum and I finally decided to take the approach of almost a student teacher, wherein I taught my audience without patronizing her by defending my thesis. This makes me think of the outer-thinking model proposed by Flower and Hayes in Bizzel's article, "Cognition, Convention and Certainty." According to the article outer-directed theorists believe "that universal, fundamental structures can't be taught; thinking and language use can never occur free of a social context that conditions them." That is to day, no one can definitely define language, because everyone sees language differently depending on their experiences in society. It was as if I was trying to figure out which form of discourse to use, but the lines were so blurred between the social structures of student and teacher I could not figure out which vocabulary and voice to use, how much detail to include without seeming as if I underestimated the intelligence of my audience. I tried to find the area where Student and Teacher overlapped and write from that intersection, but it is dubious how I succeeded.