subtext

Maybe it is just that I have been teaching through the emergence of the translation/critical literacy that much of what Myers talks about seems fairly obvious. Not to say it is not important. The conflict with the decoding/analytic literacy is that it is not dying very quickly. My students have had the idea that they cannot use “I” in their papers pressed so deeply into their brains that it often requires the persistence of a diamond miner to pull that idea out of their writing. Today a student who failed the exit level TAKS by two questions came to me (mainly because the admin is calling them in one at a time and telling them how far off they are and then telling them to go to their English teachers) he was worried about the essay portion. He wanted to make a three; he seemed to think that his writing sounded too much like his manner of talking. I found that disturbing since one of the things that is supposedly a highly valued quality on the TAKS is “voice.” Of course, what qualifies, as voice is not necessarily what the students see as voice. I am not sure myself what it is supposed to mean. I don’t think it is simply an awareness of audience, which seemed to be the definition at a workshop I attended recently. Maybe I am naïve, but I think that one can sound like the way they talk and still move from one speech event to another no matter how “formal” or “informal” the event may be. Yes, there are expectations of tone and diction, but the main personality that one projects can still be the voice of any type of writing, whether it be an academic essay, a poem or an email. “I yam what I yam,” Popeye said.