Customer Reviews

Voice Lessons: Classroom Activities to Teach Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax, and Tone

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Nancy Dean's Voice Lessons provide 100 quotes from a variety of writers, genres, and styles followed by poignant analysis questions and corresponding modeling exercises.

The introduction thoroughly defines each facet of Voice to be explored. The body is divided into 20 pages of exercises per category: Diction, Details, Imagery, Syntax, and Tone (here linked with Attitude). Each page has ample space for answers on photocopies or on an overhead transparency (both permissable and encouraged). Dean outlines practical-- and flexible--methods for utilizing the activities straight from the book with no additional preparation stress. (I can testify that the suggestions do work!)

My general level to AP students' interest was piqued by samples from modern writers such as Tom Wolfe, Erma Bombeck, Chinua Cchebe and Toni Morrison along with cannonized authors like Shakespeare, Orwell, Steinbeck, Milton, Yeats, and even G.B. Shaw. The book is a wonderful resource for state and national competency test preparation or for increasing reading comprehension and literary appreciation. Compliments to Ms.Dean.

Voice Lessons is a very useful tool for aspiring writers at the high school level and beyond. Dean focuses on five elements of voice: diction, detail, imagry, syntax, and tone. In 100 self-contained exercises, the student is presented with a literary excerpt (the range and diversity of the quotations is wonderful!), and then given questions for discussion and application. Students learn firsthand from the greatest writers in the English language, and really begin to think about their writing. This book is a joy to work with!

Voice Lessons is a collection of writing exercises that will stretch the brightest students and focus the rest. Each exercise begins with an example from a broad range of English literature and then challenges the reader to examine how it manages one of the following components: Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax and Tone.

In addition to being a quite useful collection of exercises, there are some important, benefits to the manner of presentation. The diversity of the selections (as well as their brevity) establishes, as a given, that the issues explored in these exercises have a wide application. Also, there are no lauditory introductions to or explanations of the excerpted authors: instead, each selection is placed on our workbench and we are encouraged to paw the offering and then to fashion our own. I particularly like this respectful, workaday approach to the student and the task of learning.

The exercises work independently so you should find it easy to mix and match them to conform to your existing course-plan. If you have the luxury of an independent plan for each student the book is a whole kit of ready starting points.

This is a superb introduction to teaching the components of voice. The selections not only illustrate diction, imagery, detail, tone, and syntax with brevity and specificity, but also they afford an opportunity for deep discussion and reflection. I use these exercises with my sophomores every day.

My students love these activities. It allows them to view voice in other authors' works and then to create their own. Great resource!

Voice is perhaps the hardest of the 6 traits to teach. With my sophomore core English students, I would do 1 voice lesson each week for their warm up and it was amazing how much more accessible that vague idea of "voice" came to both myself and my students over the school year. The whole English department at my school uses Voice Lessons...9th grade teachers do a certain number, 10th grade, etc. By the time a student graduates, they will have done all the voice lessons. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to any English teacher or teacher who teaches writing (and which teachers don't?!).

This book is good for a class warmup. It probably could benefit from more indepth questions or more complex examples built on the
basic ones in the book, but it is very easy for the students to
comprehend. It might be a bit too basic for anything more than
grade level classes. The questions and answers are very obvious
for my Pre Ap students. I think it is a very good start!

This is an amazing find. Nancy Dean creates simple exercises that invite students to notice the craft behind all great writing. With intriguing quotes and delicious discussion starters, students cannot help but start to talk about word choice, sentence structure, tone, etc. Instead of force-feeding students with heavy terminology and rote memorization of how grammar works, Dean instead helps teachers create an environment in which those students ask for that same terminology in order to better express their thoughts. This book goes beyond forcing students to regurgitate dry terms by engaging students' innate abilities to critically assess what they read. A must have!

This title was recommended to me by our AP English teacher and she was right. A few simple lessons from each section and my high school students had a much better understanding of voice.

I teach a pre-AP class, and one of the major skills the kids practice is learning to recognize an author's tone through diction, syntax, etc. This book is a collection of excellent warm-up exercises that develop close reading and writing skills. I would highly recommend it; my copy is, in fact, loaned out at the moment to one of my colleagues!