How do you know me?
Maybe I’m your family member, your student, your friend, or maybe I’m just the person you know from reading the text on your screen. Maybe you’ve been keeping up with my blog and taking a look at my work, or maybe you’ve just met me. Regardless, I have one question.
Who am I?
If I’ve done a good job at crafting this blog, and you’ve been reading for a while, then you should have an answer. If you can’t understand who I am from my writing, and can’t attach an identity to the way I write, then I have failed and my writing is missing one important thing.
Voice is the unique style or personality that the writer brings to their writing. If you have a well developed voice, you writing will shine as your own and be recognizable as yours. This is what my most recent humanities project focused on. It was a quick project called The Write Stuff. The driving question behind this project was:
How can we develop our voice as writers?
Throughout this project we experimented with many different types of writing. We tried writing a song from the perspective of a whale, we wrote reflections of written work, we marked essays, we graphed times we had fun writing, and so many more. This was all leasing us to discover our voice in our writing.
Another part of this project was going back the note taking method that we experimented with at the start of the year (the Zettelcasten Method). We revisited this so that we could all take a chance to think about the notes that we had taken and how those were working out for us.
At the end of the project, we chose something to write about. It could’ve been anything we had done throughout the project. I did mine on the sticky notes we wrote down about who I am as a writer. The artists statement that I created was:
I like to write, not for perfection or praise but to capture some of the many unique and complex ideas that are constantly going through my head and make up who I am.
I thought this was a great representation of me but there was a lot I had to say about it because it meant a lot to me. This is what I chose as a final product to show off my voice. I chose to tell a story of my relationship with writing over the years.
How can you find your voice?
Think about times you’ve written things you’ve enjoyed, or things that have made you proud. In my experience, when you are writing from the heart, your voice will come naturally. Embrace that voice and use it in all of your writing. That way, your writing will be yours, and nobody will able to take your style.
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