Teaching with Writelike ARCHIVED NOV 2023

Voice as a solution to overwhelm

One of the biggest obstacles in writing is overwhelm:"I don't know what to say. I don't know how to say it. There are too many choices. It's overwhelming." 

One of the most reliable ways to defeat overwhelm is to get the voice. If you don't have the right voice for a piece, writing is a struggle. If you unlock the voice, writing is an order of magnitude easier.

Why is it so? Maybe it's because "voice" represents an entire schema of grammar and vocabulary choices—too many to think about individually, but powerful as a system.

If you have the voice, you have the grammar and vocabulary, and that collapses the range of possibilities in your writing down so dramatically that the whole process is no longer so overwhelming.

Good writers are good at voices

Writelike originally arose out of this observation: good writers are good at voices.

But how do they get good at voices? Sure, lots of reading, and then picking up patterns either by intuition or analysis. But the process is a bit opaque, a bit too "if you've got it, you've got it; if you don't, you don't" to be helpful.

So the original idea with Writelike was to develop a tool that a writer might use as a kind of voice gym, copying and combining voices in short snippets, building chops.

If the audience were already skilled writers, that might be straightforward. But we also wanted to teach novice school students, a task that turns out to be much more challenging, and requires some educational theory.