English 101/103

Dinan

Adding Your Own Voice -- A Public Reflection Upon Your High School English Life

The final part of your “Voices” project will be a third piece which once again uses basically the same subject matter as you’ve used in the Informal and Formal creations--but is driven by a different audience and purpose, and thus will look and sound somewhat different from the other two.

Here’s the context – what we writing teachers call “the rhetorical situation.” We have certain teacher-education classes in our department for our English majors who are planning to go into public-school teaching. Most of the students in those classes are on the verge of going into a world that, frankly, you have more expertise regarding than most of them do. And most of them are worried about it, wondering “What am I getting myself into here?” Well, go ahead and tell them. You’ll only be able to tell them part of the story, of course [the part of your high school English experience you wrote about in the conversational and formal pieces – though I’ll give you some leeway here]; but I truly believe that an anthology of such writings/insights will cumulatively give them a very good picture indeed of what they “are getting themselves into.” The purpose of this anthology is to give those pre-service teaching candidates--and their instructors!--some valuable “from the horse’s mouth” (don’t take that personally) insight into how things are in high school English classes these days, at least from the students’ perspective, and, if you wish, your advice about how they ought to deal with it. (As you may know, lots of opinions exist about this, but (sadly but predictably) the students’ opinions are the least likely to be heard, even when the news is good. You’ll change that a bit here.)

Your submission to this anthology, which in it’s “Instructor Draft” stage should not be under 400 words nor over 500 words, should be conventional in certain ways; that is, it should have an introduction, a “body” (1-3 paragraphs, most likely), and a (brief?) conclusion. That is, it should have some kind of focusing statement (“thesis statement”) early on, and the opening sentence of each paragraph should be adequate as a “transition” sentence. So you probably will have to create a little bit of new “superstructure” for your piece. But all in all, the basic “stuff” of your essay will be the subject matter you have already used for the other two parts of the project. The packaging is the main difference--nicely-aged wine, new bottle.

In some ways I look at this as a kind of “My Turn” piece that you might write to Newsweek magazine as a personal way of sharing with the readership of that magazine some of your expert (and here you are an expert here) experiences and ideas about the literacy education at least some kids are getting in the schools these days--for better and/or for worse. You might also think of it as an “Open Letter to Future English Teachers” – and use words to that effect as a salutation that begins your letter. I will be putting these pieces together in an anthology and presenting it to the two teachers in our English Department who teach our “teaching methods” courses (Eng. 311 & Eng. 319).

Part of that “packaging” (though it’s more important that just that) of this public piece of writing is the “voice” you’ll be using for this new version. Because this is a piece written by you (it’s your turn), your “voice” should be one that you are comfortable with, that allows you to be authentic, but still understands the constraints of what we call “the rhetorical situation.” As I mentioned earlier, his is a public piece, written to be both interesting and informative to a public audience (the readers of that anthology I mentioned). If I were to guess, I’d say that your “voice” here will be different from either of the two voices you have used so far during this project, since those were deliberately playful, pushing the envelope. The range between, though, is very broad. You have plenty of choices to make.