Looking at my CR articles makes me think that my voice tends to be optimistic. In the past I predominantly wrote about positive things that were happening on campus such as the painted kindness rocks, tower gardens, and the transgender awareness week. Even if the article involves a bad aspect (such as the vandalism done to the Spoonholder bench after it had been painted in the colors of the transgender flag) I emphasize the positive aspects of events. I don’t know how I feel about this discovery because I’m more of a pessimistic person and so now it feels like I’m not being truthful in my articles.
What makes my writing mine is my inability to keep sentences short and my attempt to always connect all of the paragraphs with each other. I wonder if a stranger reading my stories would think that they are written in an odd kind of English and if they would be able to guess that English is not my first language.
You may be right about the sentence structure, Emily, but I don’t know that what you write about is “positive.” The stories you use as examples simply presented facts. It’s the reader who is going to decide if they’re “positive” or not. That is different, I think, than purposely looking for the negative detail or the snarky comment.