| Lauren E. Tyrrell received her BA in English from Marywood University in 2009. She wrote "Excuse My Excess" as her senior thesis under the direction of Dr. Laurie McMillan. Presently, Lauren is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction writing at the Pennsylvania State University. |
Xchanges >> Issue 6.1>> Excuse My Excess
Excuse My Excess Lauren E. Tyrrell Preface: The Events Leading Up to February 27 My thesis advisor and I had a great rapport, so when she initially asked me about my ideas for the project – this is nine months before my final draft would be due on February 27 – I told her I was planning to analyze the significance of racquet-based athletics in literature from a feminist deconstructive perspective. To her credit, she didn’t flinch. Then I told her my real idea: voice in writing. (Had I only known the heated compositional and rhetorical debates into which I’d be flinging myself with that decision, I may have opted for that first plan.) The question arose: what could I, a student, contribute to the field? One option was a careful compilation of views of voice in writing: I certainly had enough resources and enough notes to manage that. Another was a written manifestation of that research, a thesis that participated in ongoing rhetorical debates by exposing the underbelly of the writing process to say, “Stop theorizing for a moment and let’s look at the practical application of all this talk!” I chose the latter. What follows is the product of this choice. The piece, I would argue, is experimental in form. Unlike traditional theses, the research is isolated from the text, placed beside parts of my own prose that a particular scholar’s research had influenced. In this way, I am preserving my own tapestry of words while still nodding my acknowledgment to the many resources backing it up. With experimentation came, of course, dozens of revisions and full-out rewrites of sections; most pronounced, however, is the change in my own perspective on voice from the start to the conclusion of my project. I realized that writers need different types of voices for different writing situations; that an academic tone can be just as effective as a creative one; and that true voice is not a frozen concept, but rather a fluid notion with the capability to adjust itself appropriately to audience and purpose. This notion ultimately served as the guiding thesis statement for my project. Note from Xchanges editor: |