"Excuse My Excess"

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.

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Note from Xchanges editor:
To honor Lauren Tyrrell’s “tapestry of words” in her thesis and her original textual design decisions, we direct you to her full thesis as a PDF.