All The Write Things In All The Write Places

Writing, talking, walking and general existing. All these things share one similar trait. Who, you, are. There are many things that build up your character and one crucial part is your writer’s voice. That’s what this project was about.

Hello Internet, welcome back to my blog. This project was called the write stuff and it was all about finding your writer’s voice. I think I do a pretty good job at letting people know it’s me when I’m writing because abuse I write similarly to how I talk, but this project helped me learn about new ways I can bring forth my tongue into my literature (see look fancy words). The driving question for this project was “How do we develop our voice as writers?”. This question has many answers, so in order to answer it I will tell you about all the things we did to figure it out. Before we get started I would like to say this was a relatively short project and I was sick for a whole week so I’ll be missing some details. If you want a good overview on the whole project check out some of my friend’s blogs like Brooke and Logan.

First of all, we examined 3 essays (2 because I got sick) and answered questions about them so we could see what we found interesting and what was boring to a reader.

No Canada

The first essay was called No Canada, and it talked all about how the writer thought O Canada was a bad song. When going through this piece it felt like the writer was being really whiny, as he kept making claims that were entirely opinion-based, and not backing it up with any facts or evidence. However, it did have a good and clear structure with each paragraph having a clear point. By reading this essay I learned to avoid putting too much of my own feelings into my work.

All Quiet On The Northern Front

The second essay was called All Quiet On The Northern Front and was all about how Canadians are portrayed across the world. I found this essay much better quality because while it still had opinions, it was also backed up by logic, facts, and possible explanations. This piece also provided examples using previous interviews to help explain their point. From this essay, I learned that evidence is super important if you want to persuade a reader.

It was around here when I got sick and missed an entire third of the project, that’s right, this was only a 3-week project and I missed a whole week. So I missed the entire explanation of the 6+1 traits (check out my friends to see what those are). Since I missed this part we’ll just skip to where I came back.

So I’m back at school, stressing about all the things I’ve learned and then BOOM, I find out what the final project is like that. I suddenly realize that I have to write a whole essay by the end of the week, not too bad right? Then I’m told at the end of the week our teachers will come in and read the class’s essays and try to guess who wrote them. Luckily we were able to write about whatever we wanted so I chose a topic near and dear to me. Video games. More specifically, the health benefits and debunking myths about them. But we have 1 more super fun activity that we did in class.

So our teacher takes us outside and lines us up like roll call in a prison and explains the activity. She gives us a prompt and we have to count to ten using that voice, weird right? So we do that and then she tells us to walk back and forth in different ways with the prompts she gives us. I’m still a bit confused then she explains the premise of the exercise. Each one of us walked and talked in different ways at the start then when we saw things we liked from other people we used some of their ideas, this is the same thing with writing. Everyone starts in their own way, and then by consuming different media we build on what we do and change it to form our own style. I really liked this activity because we got to go outside and it helped us realize what our writing style is really all about.

So now, with all the things I learned, I took parts of everything I liked from this project, as well as my own quirks, and merged them all into my essay. I think I did a great job at showing my personality, BUT ONLY ONE OF THE THREE TEACHERS GOT IT RIGHT! To be fair it was pretty long so they didn’t read the whole thing, but I called myself a nerd, who else does that? Anyway, if you want to read my essay you can have a look here.

Finally, we come back to the driving question, “How do we develop our voice as writers?” This is different for everyone and you can obviously use the activities I talked about in this project, but I’ll give an answer that really works for me. When you are writing, speak it out loud or in your head with your voice. If it sounds right then perfect, but sometimes it sounds a little off and you wouldn’t realize if you hadn’t spoken it. This is a strategy I’ve used for years and it also helps me with punctuation and grammar.

Thank you for reading my blog post, I hope you learned something and I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.