At first, I wasn’t very comfortable with using my own voice in academic writing. I wasn’t sure how to incorporate my voice into the writing, because my essential thought was that the essay had to be mostly summary and explanation and only a little bit of my thoughts. This lead me to only include my voice a little bit here and there.

When we got the prompt for the second essay, I was intrigued to see that it was a “personal-academic” essay. This specifically calls for a personal scenario that could relate to the themes and ideas in the texts that we were given to write about. I felt a lot more comfortable using my own voice in the writing, because it specifically asked me to. I had a little trouble figuring out what personal scenario to include that would relate specifically to the prompt, but once I did, I was golden. The personal scenario was actually the strongest part of my essay.

What I found interesting in this chapter from “They Say, I Say” is the use of actually translating a complicated sentence into your own everyday speech, by literally using the word “translation.” I had never thought to do this before, even though I had seen it done previously. This may be a new writing tool that I would like to try to use in my future while writing. I will most likely only be using it if I need to, because I normally don’t tend to make sentences too complicated for readers to comprehend.