AP teacher or not, cultivating and nurturing voice in student writing is very difficult to do.
In fact, many teachers have said that I'm off my rocker because I firmly believe that the things of voice, rhythm, flow, pizazz, flare, spunkiness ... they all can be taught.
So ... why is it that only 1 out of nearly 800 students earn the ever-so-elusive sophistication point on both AP exams?
The answer ...
The implicit skills are really hard to teach.
In today's video, I highlight a Voice Lesson exercise in which my students do a re-rendering of classic Disney bedtime stories using their best academic voices.
But the kicker --- sophistication has a nice teeter-totter balance between the academic/colloquial/vernacular.
That's the key that opens up the door of everything.
Using millions of million dollar words does not equate to good writing.
And if a student does not have general mastery of their syntactical choices ...
Sophistication ain't happening.
In the video, we'll walk you through the project from start to finish.
As we head into the holidays, this seemed to serve as a nice reprieve from our daily grind of cranking academic essays.
These Voice Lesson exercises are just one of many activities that are housed in my Nuance Academy -- a deliberate program of study I run with my students to teach all of the basics plus all of that elusive "stuff" to help students break the glass ceiling of any rubric.
Beginning the evening of January 8th at 7 EST, the National Writing Project and I will be launching my Teach It "Write" 5-Week Mastermind.
We will meet live in Zoom for five consecutive weeks.
Each session is an hour long followed by Q&A.
As we approach the new year, and if you'd like to recommit to being the best writing instructor you can be, we'd love for you to join us.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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