This last time my classes wrote essays, I gave them a week between the writing of the rough draft and the submission of the final draft so that they could come and have conferences with me about their writing. It wasn't required, but I offered extra credit on a sliding scale based on how much I thought students needed my help, and quite a few people came. I tried to keep them brief, focused, and relatively positive.
A trend that I noticed was sentences that just flat out didn't make sense. No real grammar issues or anything of that nature, just...weird. Convoluted or stilted or just plain nonsensical. I told several of these students I wasn't sure what they meant and asked them to tell me and, without fail, they each were able to express their thoughts clearly and concisely in conversation when they hadn't done so in writing. I got tired of this fairly quickly and finally responded to a student's translation with, "Well, why didn't you write THAT?!?" He said he was trying to sound smart. He and I both laughed a little because, well, his attempt had obviously failed. I reassured him that his own words were much clearer and more appropriate and that he sounded smartest when he used them instead of someone else's. He seemed relieved, as did every student after him to whom I repeated this sage advice.
Now I know. Next year, I'll start out by saying this. I think the idea that my students' own voices are better than any voices they could try to imitate is really priceless information to impart to them.
I remember wanting to sound smart and impress the teacher with my papers when I was in high school. I hated the thought of being inferior to my peers and noticed that when I did that I felt more insecure about my paper. Even now I try to please the teacher when I write and I hate it. I hate not being able to have a true voice because of the fear of being graded low or being looked down at.
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of the imitating stems from prompt writing. It seems that when a prompt or a standardized test is given, one feels the need to bring out all of the fancy vocabulary words and grammar that we haven't really used before. It a fear of being judged, and by instilling in students the idea that their voice and point of view is important, is a great way to build confidence in writing and in any other aspect of their lives.