Find your voice
A couple of weeks ago I talked about my headline (what do you want to be famous for?) and challenged you to think about yours. If Learn, Practice, Feedback, Reflect, Community are my five words, these three words are my alternates: Find your voice. Throughout my career, I have specialized in helping scholars find their voices in every sense of that phrase, whether they are honing their English language skills, figuring out how to talk about their research, or standing on a stage to speak with power and conviction.
When I was brought on to help launch and develop a new dean’s initiative, in which PhD students were tasked with crafting 5-minute presentations of their dissertation work to share in a grand public symposium (Harvard Horizons), I came up with the tagline for the program: “find your voice as a scholar.” What is the essence of your work, and what do you want to share about it? What do you want people to understand about what you do, and what questions do you want them to ask you? Are you able to convey your project in a concise and compelling way? The key for most students is first figuring out exactly what the essence of the work is and how they want to talk about it.
Speaking is not independent from knowing. It’s not like your perfect clear project exists separately from how you talk or write about it. Sharing it with different audiences to see how they respond and what questions they ask can help even the most advanced scholars understand their work in new ways. Students I coach regularly have these aha moments: this is what I am doing, and this is what I want everyone to know about it! They are finding their voices.
I am a bit concerned about voice these days, not for graduate students and scholars as much as for the next generation learning to communicate in the age of AI. I am not sure what voice the AI has. You might take the approach of using AI as a source of information that you can put into your own voice. But what if you haven’t found your voice yet? Last week my 8th grader asked me for help with an essay, in which he was drawing on evidence from two stories to make an argument about a theme. When I read it, the first thing I noticed was how many times he said “this.” This is because… this is shown by…etc. In my 9th grade English class I learned never to use “this.” Mr. Tayloe would say, “what is this? What do you mean by this!? Be specific. Say what you mean.” His advice had such a positive impact on my writing, and even now I find myself hearing his words sometimes, trying to push myself to be more precise. As I was sharing Mr. Tayloe’s advice with my son, he showed me the rubric and planner his teacher had given them for the essay. Many of the sample sentences given to use in the essay included “this,” especially “this is shown by ____ and ____,” which to me was the weakest sentence he had. Why not say “the authors argue…” or even just name your two points and why they matter? But he said Mom, see, that sentence is worth 2 points in the rubric, I better keep it.
I am all for rubrics, helping students organize their thoughts, and giving them scaffolding language to use. From my work teaching language and communication, I know how helpful it is to teach phrases for specific tasks and to introduce structures that can help students make their points effectively. But my son’s assignment definitely got me worried. No wonder AI seems like such a threat to writing, especially at beginner levels. In this system, I am not sure my son is writing to learn. He is writing what he thinks he is supposed to say. How will he learn to develop his own voice?
So, just like I have done with many graduate students before him, I summarized what I thought he was saying in his draft. I asked more questions about what HE thought about the stories, and what he wanted to say about them. I tried to help him see that what really mattered was what the stories made him think about, and what he wanted to say about how they related to his assigned theme. In the end I left him alone with the bad sentence, and overall he said more, which really strengthened the essay. The key question now, for students from junior high to graduate school is: what do you actually want to say? If you don’t know, or you are just saying what your teacher or advisor wants you to say, what you think you are supposed to say, or what the AI might say, then we have a bigger problem. We need human teachers and supporters to prompt us and listen to us and reflect back what we are saying, to let us know that what we have to say matters. Through such interactions, we can find and hone our voices.
Do you have a paper or presentation coming up? Would you like to talk through your next project, to help clarify the essence of your work? I can’t wait to meet with you!
