Reading: J.K. Rowling's Secret Identity Teaches Us About Voice

Recently, famed author J. K. Rowling was revealed to be the truth author behind the mystery novel The Cuckoo's Calling, which she penned under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith.

A post from Time allows a linguistic analyst the opportunity to explain how researchers uncovered Rowling's true identity, and it gives us an opportunity to talk about voice and style.

Conversation: Remembering What It's Like to Be "Developmental"

This post has been cross-posted from Balancing Jane. 

I love to write, and I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school, I used to scribble stories on napkins. When I was in middle school, I kept hundreds of pages of angst-filled journals. In high school, I hid in the back of math class and wrote poems in the margins of my notebook (I still studied for math; don't yell at me, math teachers). Writing has always been something that I just do. Sometimes I get the urge to write and literally cannot sleep until I get up and do it. I've learned not to fight it.

But my students don't always feel that way. Some of them do. In fact, I am always blown away by at least one or two students every class who just clearly love writing and have a very clear talent for seeing the world through a creative and unique perspective. They are a joy to teach.

But so are the ones who hate writing, and there are a lot of them. See, I teach developmental writing, so my students have often been told (or have told themselves) that they "can't" write. They sometimes hide behind that "can't" to protect themselves from the sting of failure. If they don't believe they can do it, an F on a paper isn't a big deal. More often, though, that "can't" isn't just a shield; it's a block. It stands in the way of everything else they will do in my class.

I give them analogies, of course. I tell them that too many people treat writing as a one-shot thing. It's like they decided to try being basketball players without practicing, walked onto a court for the first time, picked up a ball, shot it from half court, missed, and said "Oh, I guess I can't play basketball."

When Students Say, "You don't like me"

Last week, one of my students, when confronted with a bad grade, asked me why I don’t like him. In 8 years of teaching college writing, I have had several students ask some version of the question, “Why don't you like me?” They have asked with genuine confusion, hurt, and disappointment, either about a bad grade or my refusal to excuse a late paper.

I have genuinely liked all of these students, and many ended up acing my class. But the question from last week and semesters previous has me wondering: what does my students’ perception of my liking or disliking them have to do with their grades, meeting expectations, my role as a teacher?