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An instructor of an advanced composition course (adapted from one taught by James Seitz at the University of Pittsburgh) at the University of California Riverside took her students through a series of reading and writing assignments that asked them to "engage in a wide variety of prose styles and...consider what style suggests about language, subjectivity, and artistic expression." The students worked with several fiction and nonfiction texts, first analyzing their stylistics and then emulating some particular stylistic feature in their own prose. Writing assignments included epistolary writing, shifts between third and first person and the incorporation of two or three different languages and dialects, composing their own "modest proposals," retelling a fairy tale from the point of view of a "misunderstood" character, and taking on the persona of Holden Caulfield. In their introductions to their portfolios, almost every student--8 out of 12 in the class--included an analysis of what had come to be known as the "Holden paper," a 3-to-4-page piece in which they each re-wrote a newspaper article of their choice in Holden Caulfield's voice. One student's "Holden paper" serves as an illustration of the work. As the instructor looks back at last Winter's class, she is encouraged by the fact that racial, gender, and age differences from Holden's white male adolescence did not seem to be an issue for her student writers. Mostly, the students took on Holden's voice with enthusiasm and confidence, even though they came into class wanting to stick to the known path of academic rules. (NKA)

Some of the most prominent aspects of an ethnographic study of six black undergraduate women at the University of Pittsburgh have been the questions of authenticity and visibility that have emerged while the ethnographer watched the ways students' voices challenged their various composition and writing intensive course instructors' expectations. As she observed the students' written negotiations with their predominantly white audiences, and particularly with their white instructors, the ethnographer noticed that one of the white instructors did not seem to consider her black students' voices "authentic" unless they were articulating black racial issues. At this juncture of the research, the ethnographer would generally argue that, based on observed specifics, when instructors bring their conjectures about the features of a racially "authentic" voice to their readings of minority student writing, it can obstruct their view of the student as a whole student writer. When they ignore race, however, it can render them unable to see the difference that the students' race can make to their writing. Examples of the first pedagogic approach and of the second pedagogic approach help illustrate the issue. The upside of the two examples is that each of the two students' voices emerged in response to each of their instructors' pedagogical approaches in ways that turned their instructors' ideas about authenticity (the first case) and visibility (the second case) upside down. But perhaps a less obstructive middle ground exists. (NKA)