College Essay, Your Voice? College essays are supposed to represent the applicant's personality; as their paper doppelgänger, if anything should "center" the student voice, that's it. Personal essay teachers are tasked with "preserving" student voice. As your guide, my style should be invisible behind yours. No ventriloquism here. But sometimes, easier said than done. And the issue is not just aesthetic, but moral. 826NYC & Voice Justice This week I attended the interactive workshop "Justice & Equity Dialogues: Centering Student Voice" 826NYC, an organization I've had a crush on for some time. They host their writing magic in a "secret library" behind a superhero supply storefront (I mean, you checked their site, right?). So, enough said. Their workspace has warm wood tables, exposed brick, and two clocks, for "Brooklyn Time" and "Manhattan Time." The latter is an hour ahead of the former because, well, you people in Manhattan rush a tad too much. Their library, airy and light, is filled with self-published student work side by side with destined to be classics like, ahem, that new ballsy Bunny Book by John Oliver. Language Unicorn The facilitator, Rebecca Darugar, 826NYC's Director of Education, began the workshop by asking us to draw a unicorn together in our small groups on chart paper with markers, no further instructions. There was no model unicorn for us to study. And yet, when we compared the four drawings, they all had...what? You guessed it: a prominent horn, a more-or-less horse's physique, a mane (but a rainbow mane, m'kay?). Darugar pointed out: See? A unicorn doesn't exist. But still, we all follow these rules, which we've created and agreed upon at some point, that the unicorn looks a certain way. And only that way. No one's unicorn had a giraffe's body, none a lizard's. An imaginary beast, it nonetheless cohered to a relatively limited set of features. And (the main point of the workshop) language is just like that: language is an Continue Reading …