An Author’s Voice

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

The second essay can use just about any kind of entertainment, definitely including music videos.

Share your draft with me by class time Monday, then meet with me to discuss that draft sometime Monday afternoon through Wednesday.

Voice

Based on chapter 9 of They Say, I Say.

Key Ideas

Clarity matters more than formality: mixing academic and informal usage to balance cryptic technical terms with accessible ones can make both parts clearer, and is therefore an acceptable thing to do.

Ethos

A term from Aristotle’s ideas about rhetoric, referring to how an author or speaker comes across to their audience.

It’s why the author’s voice matters. How you write can make you come across as trustworthy or untrustworthy, knowledgeable about your subject or not, concerned about it or indifferent, friendly or remote, etc. etc. etc.. All of these impressions have different impacts on readers.

Practice

Geneseo has a number of scholarships for students, and every spring runs a coordinated application process — students who want scholarships write brief applications, and the financial aid office uses those applications to match students with appropriate scholarships, basically trying to get the most money distributed most equitably.

Let’s “workshop” (i.e., collectively write and revise) some semi-hypothetical opening paragraphs for such applications.

This is basically the opening to a piece of persuasive writing, aiming to persuade readers that you should get a scholarship. As such, it should lay out a “thesis” about why you deserve the scholarship, but should also begin building a sense of who you are.

We did this in a Google doc at

We started with very generic sentences that stated possible theses, i.e., reasons why the writer should get a scholarship. One, which we worked on subsequently, was that the writer wants to somehow serve others after graduating. The other, which we didn’t do much with but is in the Google doc if anyone wants to think about it, is that the writer wants to earn money with which to support some cause.

We fleshed out the vague idea of “serve others” into a specific but still hypothetical desire to teach children, and came up with some hypothetical (again) background to motivate it. But the wording was still very generically formal, there was no sense that the author was a person.

We made the paragraph much more human-feeling by replacing the generic formal wording about motivating background with something more casual.

We moved those background and motivation sentences to the beginning of the paragraph, to best get someone reading it to think “hey, there’s a real person behind this.”

Finally we started working on transitions from the motivation to the actual thesis. This still sounds quite formal, and the thesis probably needs a little more specificity about why a scholarship will help the writer achieve their dream of becoming a motivational teacher to young children. These are all things you can keep thinking about if you want.

Next

Theses and thesis statements.

Please read “The Thesis Statement” in the “Conventions of College Writing” self-enroll Canvas “course”/writing guide.

(Enroll yourself in this course at https://canvas.geneseo.edu/enroll/6KRFRT if you haven’t already done so.)

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