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?
 develop her own style, finding what particular personality traits stick out in her writing
 writing honestly and naturally, not trying to force or sound like someone else.
 “sound smart”
 expressing feelings or beliefs about a subject (element of Risk)
 PRACTICE- WRITE, WRITE, WRITE!
c.
Why is voice essential to an essay?
 adds an honesty provides a window that the audience is able to use to see one’s perspective
 WINDOW::let’s things in and out allows one to look in somewhere.
 how the writer expresses herself
 knowledge (e.g. actual information about the topic which she is writing,
perspective, insight into a text or experience) the writer expressed through the
voice
 personality that the writer injects into the writing (e.g. humorous, etc.)
 a window into herself
d.
What does Menand suggest to you about how writers write?
 kinda happens, takes time and dedication voice is like gravy
 voice comes to you apotheosis
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.