Choose your favorite books - or editorials, journal articles, poems, whatever. Read them aloud. You don’t have to do the whole piece, either. A segment often makes the point. Just let students hear the voice.

Ask students to read aloud, also. This is often less intimidating in small groups, so you might ask them to bring a favorite passage to a response group, in which everyone will share. Ask them to first, spend some time making their selection-something that could be read in five minutes or less - and second, to put plenty of feeling into it, almost as if they were trying to wake someone up. Liveliness is the key. Some students may wish to perform their readings for the whole class.

Each piece of music has a kind of voice of its own. To see how true this is, create a voice collage through a collection of highly diverse music - e.g., Wille Nelson, Mozart, the Beatles, Luciano Povarotti, Aretha Franklin, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Beethoven, etc. See if students can come up with a one-word description for the "voice" within each piece of music.

Have a "dress with voice" day in which students have freedom to choose something original - a hat, shoes, tie, special shirt, socks, or whatever. If your dress code allows, you may wish to experiment with make-up or costumes, too. Show that voice is a form of personal expression, and shows up in many forms - including dress.

Wonderful recordings by professional actors and writers abound. These people may have nothing on you when it comes to reading aloud with expression and flair, but there is much to be said for bringing another voice into the classroom to be heard.

Play the "Whose Voice is It?" game with your students (see the Activities section in this notebook). Keep it simple at first, focusing on voices your students are likely to know. You might begin with just one or two voices - one might be Jerry Seinfeld, one Edgar Allan Poe. Can they tell which is which? As this task becomes too simple, add one or two more voices, but always focusing on those your students are likely to know. Don’t forget to look at such sources as song lyrics, TV or film scripts or poetry. There’s another way to play the game, too. You don’t always have to name the author. You might ask students to identify which piece came from a newspaper, which from an encyclopedia, textbook, best seller, advertisement, business letter, etc. The voice in each piece will be a little different-because the purpose and audience are different. And remember - even if you cannot identify a voice, you can describe it. What kind of voice is it? Businesslike, philosophical, serious, humorous, sarcastic, or - ? Describing voices is an important skill, too.

Take a short passage from any writer whose voice is distinctive, and re-write the passage in another voice: e.g., Jerry Seinfeld as Hamlet, Winnie the Pooh as Edgar Allan Poe, an encyclopedia article as David Letterman or Toni Morrison or the Beatles might do it. Let your imagination run wild.

Ask your students to do a little role playing. They might write a letter to a business requesting information - or making a complaint (letters written for an invented situation, of course, need not be sent). One interesting way to do this is to divide students into groups, then have each group invent a situation for which a memo or letter response or request would be necessary. Groups can then exchange "situations," spend sometime discussing the best way to handle it (Who is the audience? What kind of voice is appropriate?), and drafting a letter they think would be appropriate. Let each group that came up with the original situation assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of the letter they received. Discuss results.

Different audiences and different situations require different voices. You might ask your students to create one short piece for two completely different audiences: e.g., an introductory brochure to the new aquarium in town for an audience of children 6-10, and one that would be mailed to overseas visitors coming to your city for the first time. Or, do different pieces that reflect different perspectives. For instance, do a traffic accident report as a police officer on the scene would describe it, and a news summary of that same accident that could be read by a TV anchor. Older students might try something a little more difficult: How to install new software as you would write it for computer-savvy adult users, and as you might write it for young computer beginners. Or - an account of a Civil War battle by a Confederate soldier - and another written by a Union soldier. Be creative in thinking about how factors like age, experience, knowledge or perspective influence voice.

Voice, like personality, tends to have ups and downs, even within a short piece. Choose a piece to assess for overall voice; then see if students can identify those moments when voice is strongest. You may even wish to graph the voice with a horizontal line graph, showing with the rises and dips how voice -like the DOW Industrial Average - has its ups and downs.

For this activity, you need to begin with a piece that has some voice, but is not overwhelming. A 3, in other words! Then, divide students into two groups - those who will write more voice in, and those who will take more voice out! You can divide the two groups into smaller teams or into pairs for the actual writing task. Read the results, and talk about the factors that make voice stronger or weaker. Do you see a link to details? To fluency?

Select two totally different writings on the same topic. Let’s say your topic is astronomy; you might choose one passage from Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos, and one from the encyclopedia. Assess both for voice, and talk about differences in purpose and audience. Sagan’s book has far more voice than an encyclopedia, obviously, but is there an important reason for this? How is voice influenced by the writer’s perceived purpose and audience?

Can writers overdo voice? Ask your students to explore greeting cards, advertisements, editorials, reviews, brochures, and political speeches or voter’s pamphlets (to name a few sources) for examples of voice that might be overdone or go too far. Post the results and discuss them.

Ask students to look for moments of voice-just moments, not whole books - and to bring them in to add to a bulletin board display. Enjoy watching your collection grow and reading the results.

The greatest writers of our time have tried their hand at defining voice. What’s your take on it? Post their definitions along with some of your own - and watch your understanding of voice bloom and blossom.