Part Author, Part Lawyer
Essays. Compositions. Papers. The idea of any of these imminent assignments strikes fear into every college student’s heart. The prospect of sitting down and working on them is a hard pill to swallow. The process is painful, and once it is over, you hope to never to see that monstrosity ever again. However, there is a trick to completing these assignments with minimal head trauma. A trick that attorneys have been using for ages, and one that is truly necessary for law.
Find your voice. And no, not the noise that protrudes from your vocal chords. It’s your writing style which varies from person to person. As one of my professors proclaimed the other day, “Each person’s writing style is as unique as a fingerprint.” That’s true. I know personally I write a lot in the “argumentative format.” Maybe it’s because I had to quickly and thoroughly convince my mom that my brother started the fight (which HE DID! I promise!), or possibly because I had to continuously convince my friends to not do stupid things in high school. Nonetheless, I write like I am always trying to convince my professor that there was a UFO in Stephenville as if my life depended on it.
How do you find your voice? It’s like everything else with life, it comes from practice. In high school, I wrote papers that were fundamentally sound. They had great evidence and were organized correctly, but they were dead. They were absolutely boring. On the urging of one of my teachers, I joined a UIL Writing Team because although I was boring, I still made some sense. After minimal success, I sat down with my teacher and began to analyze what was wrong with my papers. She read over my paper and told me to talk through my paper. I began to, and she stopped me half-way through and told me, “Everything you have said makes sense, but your paper does not reflect how you speak at all.” Soon afterwards, I had to write a 1200 word paper every other week within a two-hour time span. It took some effort, but I eventually learned to write like I spoke. Once I was able to accomplish this feat, I applied this to everything I wrote. Now out of habit, I write AIM, text messages, and Facebook messages in sentence format with some SAT words thrown in. I might be the biggest nerd you ever see on Facebook, but it provides me an opportunity to practice without making it tedious.
You might not want to write unless you get something in return, that is why I am an advocate of taking Intro to Non-Fiction and Technical Writing. Intro to Non-Fiction makes the student think about how to logically argue an opinion clearly and effectively. Technical Writing makes a student express the information he or she is trying to convey concisely and quickly in an understandable format. These classes might be thought of as constrictive by some people, but they help to evolve your voice into formats that will be extremely useful later in your career. Your individual voice is far from lost, it has taken an enormous step towards professionalism.
Find your voice, and all writing assignments will come easy. Maybe you can convince your peers that there was a UFO in Stephenville.