I must meet the standards.
In writing from my voice’s perspective, it is possible that I produced
my first genuine piece of writing, but even my “voice” needed editing for academic purposes. At first, it was too choppy, angry, and bombastic, and I feared that it was not as smart or as analytic as it needed to be in order to meet the requirements of the assignment. It is creative, sure, but is it really genuine if it was formulated upon academic standards? The inevitable truth is that it is hard to break away from these institutional writing practices; however, my goal with this paper was to attempt to forego these restrictions of academic writing and to, instead, experiment with the ways in which my true voice can shine through these academic constraints.
Throughout the past five years, I have completely lost track of my
voice – what does it really sound like? Bartholomae brought attention to the ways in which my voice drowned within my writing habits: he made me realize that I am a manipulator. I “accommodate [my] motives to [my] readers’ expectations,” and I do so by engaging in a discourse that is not only unfamiliar and confusing to me, but not my own (Bartholomae 386). Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse. I remained completely unaware of these tendencies until Bartholomae made these habits explicitly known. I have been restrained by the discourses of instructional communities, and my voice is expressed within a limited “set of specifically acceptable gestures and commonplaces” (Bartholomae 387). With these constraints and high expectations in place, is there really room for a student to produce a “natural” piece of writing?
I am now, more than ever, insecure of my writing, and these insecuri-
ties are reflected within my predictable writing structures and my reliance on privileged discourses to speak for me. If I don’t write in this privileged voice, why should the reader take me seriously? I am overly anxious when I write in a voice that does not sound “expert-like” or intelligent because I feel that the reader will not validate my claims if they are not presented within these linguistic terms. I have just recently become comfortable with slightly step182
Excellence in Upper-Level Writing 2012