Using Mood Boards to Discuss and Analyze Voice

Because of its impressionistic, hard-to-pin-down character, discussing and analyzing voice presents challenges in the composition classroom. Mood boards, which utilize images, color, and texture, offer a nonverbal, nonlinear way of representing voice.

from Apartment Therapy

This exercise proposes using mood boards as a way to introduce discussions of voice, both in published texts and in students' own writing.This post presents two options for using mood boards to discuss voice in published work and in student drafts, though you could certainly modify any of these ideas in a number of ways to make them suit your classroom and your students.



Mood Boards, Voice, and Published Work
You might start by using a published text as the basis for discussion about voice. In my composition course, I have students read Anne Lamott's essay "Shitty First Drafts" (from her book Bird by Bird) early in the semester. We've typically then talked about the advice she offers to students, as well as the metaphors, images, and hyperbolic language she uses to convey that advice. Lamott also has a distinctive voice, though, and I've often struggled to get students to articulate this aspect of her work. Mood boards could serve as a starting point for a discussion of Lamott's voice. What follows are a few ideas of how to make this happen: 

• The instructor creates a mood board representing his/her impression of Lamott's voice and then shares that work with the class. The instructor can solicit feedback about the mood board, and students can add or adjust elements. (If classroom technology will support this, a digital mood board, such as those created on pinterest, might be useful in this collaborative step, since students and teachers could work together to find additional images, colors, and textures.) A sample mood board that I created is linked here. 

• Working collaboratively, the class creates a mood board based on their impression of Lamott's voice. Again, a digital mood board seems like the easiest way to support this collaboration, though I could certainly imagine using cut-out images from magazines or other physical components.

• Students create their own mood boards, then bring them to class. Students and instructor circulate, viewing each others' mood boards. These mood boards then serve as the starting point for class discussion of Lamott's piece. (This might be a useful strategy if you want to hold your students accountable for completing class reading and are looking for alternatives to the typical "write a summary" assignment. Creating a mood board would require students to read thoughtfully, and the results will likely be a bit more stimulating for the instructor than 19 or so summary papers.)

Mood Boards, Voice, and Invention
Just as designers often use mood boards as an inspiration source for projects, so mood boards can be used to spur invention in the composition classroom. This technique would likely work best with a personal narrative assignment. To give two quick examples: I often begin my composition course with an assignment, based on Annie Dillard's observation that "people love pretty much the same things best," that asks students to identify and describe something that they love and no one else seems to understand or appreciate. Another common assignment is one that asks students to describe their identities as writers, or to write a letter to writing communicating their relationship to writing. The technique I'm about to describe with mood boards would work with either of these assignments, or with other prompts based in personal narrative.

• After you've given the assignment, discussed your expectations, and answered any general questions about the prompt, ask students to create a mood board based on the voice of the speaker of the piece they're going to write. Students may want to create this mood board in concert with other pre-writing strategies, such as listing, free writing, and drawing/sketching. These mood boards can be used to foster conversation, either as a whole group or with workshop groups, and students can also refer back to their mood boards as they draft and revise their work.