AN EXPERIMENT IN TEACHING WRITING TO COLLEGE FRESHMEN (VOICE PROJECT).

An Experiment in Teaching Writing to College Freshmen” (Voice Project), was conducted within the regular Freshman English program at Stanford University. The experiment was carried out by a group of teachers who were themselves writers (from Stanford but also from other colleges and universities) and an equal number of graduate students–participating as team teachers–along with a hundred student volunteers. The aims of the experiment were: 1) 6 teach writing, not through rhetorical techniques, but through helping the student discover and develop his own writing “voice” and a personal or identifiable prose, whether the writing be “creative” or expository; 2) to involve in such teaching novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and persons in diverse academic disciplines; 3) to work at various age levels, through involving both students and faculty in experiments in elementary and secondary schools; 4) to work with students from various social and economic backgrounds; and 5) to involve other institutions of higher education through visits, exchanges, seminars, and demonstrations. The materials in this report document what went on in the classroom, how our students taught in local schools, how we encouraged students to write and revise their work–especially through the use of the tape recorder–and the kind of teaching a group of our students undertook in a special summer program for entering Negro students at the College of San Mateo.