English IV/Bathke/Szporn
Writing Clinic: Finding the Writer’s Voice
Name: ______________________________
Date: ______________
Part I: Introduction to Personal Writing: (Finding One’s Voice) Carefully read Louis Menand’s Introduction: Voices
(from The Best American Essays 2004). Then, answer the following questions. Be ready to share your responses.
a.
What is the writer’s voice?
b.
How does a writer “find his/her voice?
 through practice, virtues and
 Paradox that connects the heart to the idea on the page gives the writer
the opportunity to express what they feel; how then they are able to connect
what is in her heart with the audience.
 comes naturally: shouldn’t need to think about the voice trained to
recognize it
 includes originality; unique traits brings in different aspects of the world
our perspective on an experience, an event, and a text.
 ability to express what he/she wants to say in a unique way not a
straightforward manner; there is a “deeper” level to the writing a writer’s
voice brings a text beyond the surface
originality clear writing that allows the
audience to know exactly what you are saying
 having virtues good person (simplistic, basic level)
 showing a voice means having virtues SINCERITY
c.
Why is voice essential to an essay?
 makes each writer unique it’s what makes the writing different from someone else
 gives the essay a sense of originality if one’s essay lacks voice then he/she is devaluing herself as a
human being
d.
What does Menand suggest to you about how writers write?
 Window
metaphor: relating back to a photograph: to see through, allows the
audience to see the way in which the writer sees and experiences the world.
Part II: Application to the Text: Work in groups. Read and annotate two different texts (an excerpt from Richard
Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Seamus Heaney’s Digging. Discuss the writer’s voice in the text. What does the writer
show you about himself?
Richard Rodriguez:
Seamus Heaney:
Digging (Seamus Heaney)
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.