How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Tone and voice in essay writing
How to teach students to analyse texts effectively
As mentioned previously, essay writing is perceived as being less interesting than creative writing. I know a lot of teachers who’d rather ask students to write a story than get them to write an analytical essay, and you can see why. Essay writing seems a bit dry — like eating a slice of bread without butter or jam. And it can be hard to challenge that notion.
The problem is with the tone and voice that we assume an analytical essay needs. A voice that sounds like a trainspotter. It lacks emotion and feeling: ’It is a commonly held fact that the 8.15 from Manchester is regularly on time.’ The problem is that the perception is one of two extremes and the alternative reads like a children’s TV presenter: ’Oh my goodness! That funny Dickens! He certainly knows how to fool the reader, because he had us all fooled for a bit, didn’t he?’
I believe English teachers should have a bookcase full of essays. Read them and use them in lessons because they are often far from dry. They are formal, but they have a voice and are often as witty as they are learned. Take any bright student and read their essays. They have a voice and their tone varies. It might be subtle and slight, but it is there.
Show students that the tone of essays can be flattering, comical, serious, shocking or ironic. Subtly and understatedly so, but those thoughts are there. The one thing we want to avoid is informality. You can have a voice in essay writing, but you want the right level of formality. Moving from using personal pronouns to the impersonal variety or the passive voice helps to get the ball rolling.
I think Shakespeare is highlighting how parents are unable to control their children.
It can be seen that Shakespeare is highlighting how parents are unable to control their children.
An extension of this is replacing pronouns with nouns like ’the reader’, ’experts’, ’the audience’, ’critics’ or ’feminists’. It is all too easy for students to use ’you’ and ’we’, which again makes for a personal and informal read.
The audience sees that Shakespeare is highlighting how parents are unable to control their children.
This demonstrates clearly that the writer is somehow separate to the audience and possibly to the idea. Phrases like ’audiences feel’ and ’critics say’ give students a starting point to expand on or challenge an opinion. Even the nouns used to describe the writer help to aid meaning in an essay. It is at times comical and infuriating when students refer to writers by their first names. As I say to students, unless you have had them buy you a drink in a pub, never refer to the writer by their first name. Teaching students to vary how they refer to writers is important as it aids cohesion and avoids repetition. Teach students to avoid endlessly repeating ’writer’; alternatives such as author, Dickens and he allow for variety and subtle cohesion across a paragraph and an essay. A student’s essay writing voice is just as important as their understanding of the writer’s. We are just looking at using language differently in a particular context.