I have been struggling with alcoholism since I was fourteen, two years after my mother died of liver failure. My mother drank every day of her life. I want a drink every day of mine. I have been sober now for almost four months but sometimes it takes everything I have to get through one day, even the next minute. I am not a recovering alcoholic, I am an alcoholic. It is profoundly ironic to me that so many students come to college to drink because college for me, especially my work as Prof. [X]’s research assistant, is what’s keeping me from drinking. The job I have on weekends is also helping me to stay sober. I need this job to stay in school. I am working to put myself through college because my stepfather will not help out with my finances. He protested my decision to go to college. He wanted me to stay at home and work. The reason he does not want me in college is that, the year after my mother died, I took my mother’s place in my stepfather’s home. In every respect I became like his wife. It was the year after that I started drinking.

As I reread this, I realize this response isn’t going anywhere and I apologize to you Professor Sullivan, but this is the first piece of writing I have done in college and maybe that I have ever done that is in my own voice, if I can call it that. My customary writing style is scientific, by which I mean it is abstract, factual, and employs a lot of passives (as you pointed out) because it is imitative of the voice I read in the sociological texts of my major. Mr. Percy and Mr. Macrorie for that matter would probably express the opinion that my writing is slavishly imitative of the “language of the schools” and thus they would probably be highly critical of the papers I write. However, these papers have thus far earned me an A and for which I have received a research assistantship in my major of sociology. So I would respond to Mr. Percy that I am training myself to see what sociologists see in their investigations of our society and its manifold human creatures. The scientific way of writing that I employ when I write is much more comfortable to me.