"Paint Your Voice with Your Words"

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you”, the famous quote by Oscar Wilde is one of my favorites and I always have it in my mind. I also frequently share it with my students in the First-Year Composition Program to explain the connection between reading, thinking, and writing. I make sure to elaborate on the quote in the first class of the semester to emphasize the importance of expressing their thoughts effectively not only in their writing but in composing, in using all the different types of modalities they have at their disposal.

To help them achieve the goal of effective writing, I provide my students with many opportunities to write frequently and extensively while applying serious efforts to compose rhetorically effective writing pieces and multimodal projects that fit various audiences, purposes, and expectations. Above all, I always teach them how to develop their voice into their writing, to gain authorship and ownership during their writing process where their voice is dominant. Therefore, I encourage them with the saying: “Paint your voice with your words!” While they engage in the writing process: invention, outlining, drafting, and mostly appreciated revisions, they learn how to intensify their voice, their authorship. No writing is final; I help students to see through reading for revision, no matter it is scholar’s, writer’s or student’s writing piece. Starting the course with this pattern involves students in our classroom developed in a learning community, where everyone is expected to share thoughts, ideas, observations, evaluations, concerns, to raise questions and spark discussions, to look for answers, to raise even more questions, to learn through inquiry, to gain insights, to take steps towards discovery.

Inspired by David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University”, I support my students to try disciplinary ways of reading, thinking, writing, researching that are unique to their fields. My role in their invention of the university is to teach them academic discourse, the expectations of the academic audience and to show them how to write from a position of privilege. In this way, students have the opportunity to feel as “insiders” in powerful discourse with an individual right to speak and to paint their voice with their words. I regard this to be of the highest importance since students invent not only the university but also their way to the future workplace. Therefore, in my writing classroom, they refine their literacy while preparing for their roles as academics, professionals, and global citizens.

Since people only solve the problems they give themselves, the way how they approach the problem has a significant influence on their performance and success in problem-solving processes. Accordingly, my teaching philosophy relies on enforcing students rhetorical thinking and solving rhetorical problems. That is, I guide my students through critical thinking, to consider all aspects of the rhetorical problem and not just a few of them, to present problems rhetorically to themselves, and to engage successfully into writing assignments. Students learn that successful written communication includes not just considering word choices, length, flow but most importantly, their own rhetoric that relies on their creativity and reflects through the dominance of their voice.

My students are always surprised when I ask them to publish their writing, whether it is an open letter, an academic essay, or a multimodal project. However, by the time I ask them to expose their writing beyond our learning community, they already have learned how to effectively respond to a wide variety of audiences and rhetorical situations. Students gain knowledge in articulating the rhetorical purpose of their writing, which is, whom they write for, what they say, and how they decide to present their project in terms of genre and modality. I enjoy explaining to my students that well-educated people should be able to contribute to the world’s store of knowledge, and they agree with it. In the first-year composition program, they are not aware yet that they will be those well-educated people, and they look at me in awe and disbelief at first, but with agreement later on in the course.

I assist students in initiating the writing process by thinking, imagination, and invention, and I sustain it by empathy and support. To encourage students to write and revise more often, as they move from one draft to another, I do not spend my energy in pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes but in the evaluation of their expression of thoughts and ideas development. In order to motivate students to revise substantively and often, I always include in my comments suggestions to use a different move or I offer another perspective to them to think about it when revising their draft into the next one.

In assessing students’ written assignments, Elbow’s thoughts are my guidelines to evaluate more and to grade less. Additionally, in alignment with Elbow’s ideas, I provide my students with evaluation-free zones, where they engage in freewrites, quickwrites, outlining, drafting, or sharing their writings in peer review activities. Writing is a process that improves with time and practice. The more one does it, the more they like it. When evaluating their assignments, I give constructive feedback rather than a number in the form of a grade.

In “Ranking, Evaluating, Liking”, Elbow emphasizes the importance for teachers to like their students to be able to assess their work. So, I try to prevent students’ defensive stance toward the teacher as I put effort to get to know them better, to understand them, to show them that I care and that their learning and success are important to me. For all my classes, I pride myself of learning the names of all students and treat each student as an individual. As I learn about them, I also encourage them to learn about each other more. I usually have a major group assignment included in my curriculum for students to complete it by working in small groups. I emphasize the importance of practicing teamwork skills, relying on each other on the way of creating engaging and important projects, such as the Public Awareness Campaign project that they later present in class and advocate for their cause.

Supporting students along their way of inventing the university while also teaching them how to think rhetorically and to compose effectively, through the dominance of their voice, is perhaps the most important in the first-year composition classroom. First-Year courses present the opportunity for students to transition from high school to college, to academically socialize, to learn how to tackle real-life situations and to go beyond the limits they could have imagined for themselves when decided to attend university.