A Brief History of Personal Writing in
Composition Studies
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
1
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
2
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
3
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
4
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
5
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
6
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
7
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
8
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
9
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
10
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
11
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
12
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
13
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
14
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
15
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
16
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
17
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
18
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
19
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
20
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
21
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
22
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
23
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
24
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
25
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
26
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
27
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
28
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
29
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
30
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
31
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
32
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
33
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
34
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
35
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
36
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
37
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
38
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
39
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
40
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
41
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
42
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
43
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
44
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
45
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
46
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
47
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
48
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
49
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
50
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
51
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
52
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
53
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
54
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
55
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
56
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
57
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
58
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
59
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
60
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
61
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
62
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
63
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
64
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
65
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
66
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
67
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
68
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
69
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
70
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
71
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
72
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
73
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
74
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
75
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
76
Within the field of composition, personal writing—an umbrella term that includes any writing which draws on
first-hand experience, including genres such as autoethnography, autobiography, and mystory—maintains a
precarious position at best. I use personal writing both to provide a more general term that can apply to many
kinds of writing and to avoid using terminology that has historically been problematic in this genre. Following a
more general trend that started in the mid-1960s and flourished in the mid-1970s, personal experience has
appeared in the academic accounts of scholars involved in the process of creating the field and expanding it to
include disciplinary ideas from communication to cultural studies. The use of personal writing has become so
ubiquitous that often it does not get the critical attention it deserves or it receives critique that is not productive.
There are concerns that what is personal is not critical and that personal writing is therefore not what we should
be teaching our students to use in the classroom.
Deriving knowledge from personal experience is risky for at least two reasons: (1) first-hand experience may
have limited application or relevance in other situations—or as scientists and social scientists like to say,
“Anecdote is not evidence”; and (2) display of the self can often elicit harsh personal and scholarly judgments
from others. I is a well-established point of contention for the teacher, the researcher and the student—when to
allow it, how to use it, whether it is critical, where its use can be rigorous. For most people, forbidding the use
of I is an outdated notion (although the majority of students will still admit in their first college classes that at
least one of their previous English teachers banned its use), but there seem to be gaps in the critical research
supporting theories of the benefits of using I. Current personal writing terminology often carries negative
connotations, encouraging scholars to redefine their terms, and in doing so splinters the definition of personal
writing. As Karen Paley suggests in her study of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person
Writing, a book that came out of her dissertation exploring the implications of personal writing, “the sheer
circulation of so many synonyms or near synonyms may be indicative of anxiety about the personal in the
academy…. [O]n the other hand, the multiple names may reflect the versatility of the form itself” (10). I will
break down current notions of I in this introduction; in later chapters I will include assignments that use I in the
classroom both literally and metaphorically.
Tracing attitudes toward the personal and how they have evolved within the pedagogy and scholarship of
composition can establish a working definition for the term and lay out the current stakes for personal writing in
our departments and classrooms and its potential for interdisciplinary expansion. Practices associated with the
expressivist movement, such as free writing, fast drafts and even performance, have made their way into the
core curriculum of many English departments, according to composition scholars such as Paley (I-Writing) and
Thomas Newkirk (The
Performance of Self in Student Writing).
These two books thoroughly analyze the value of expressivist pedagogy as a basis for many popular
composition practices. In I-Writing, Paley views the entire debate surrounding the use of personal writing
through the history of the expressivist movement in composition, concentrating on the debate between David
Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, and evaluating the classroom practices of Patricia Bizzell to discover what the
expectations are for the personal in the classroom. After evaluating the relevant literature, Paley defines
expressivism as:
a pedagogy that includes (but is by no means limited to) an openness to the use of personal narrative, a
particular type of the narrative mode of discourse. Personal narrative takes the writer’s own experience
as its focus. It involves the use of a narrational I that seems to be the actual voice of the person who
writes. Sometimes the narrator may appear to isolate individual consciousness, and sometimes he or she
may represent the self in one or more social contexts, such as the family or college community. The
narrator may or may not explicitly link the particular situation with those experienced by others (13).
77
According to Paley, personal writing concentrates on the experience of the individual but may include outside
perspectives.
Paley conducts her research on the premise that most literature denigrating the use of I is not based on
qualitative research, a problem I will attempt to address in this introduction. According to Paley, “The
misrepresentations of pedagogies that include the teaching of personal narrative are based largely on published
writing as opposed to classroom observation” (13). In her own study, she spends time in classrooms and
interviewing scholars to add to the body of scholarship on personal writing. In doing this, she can begin to break
open the category by contributing new observations and insights.
The debate between Elbow and Bartholomae that Paley discusses may be the first thing composition scholars
refer to when analyzing personal writing. The assumption that expressivism and personal writing are the same
thing is so ubiquitous that in The Performance of Self in Student Writing, Newkirk assumes that the two
discussions are identical, moving freely between analysis of selfwriting and expressivist methodology. While the
topics have abundant similarities, we need to push past many of the restraints of expressivist writing to make
new strides in critical evaluation of personal writing. The ability of the personal narrative to allow students and
scholars to be engaged readers and thinkers becomes apparent in Newkirk’s study.
In addition to engaging expressivist pedagogy, composition scholars regularly publish personal writing that
draws on teaching practices, literacy narratives, and case studies from classrooms. While composition literature
has included many nods toward the personal in the teaching of firstyear writing, concerns arise when first-
person autobiographical perspective is employed in our publishing and when nontext-based models are used as
research methodologies. An example of this resistance can be found in reviews of current autobiographical
scholarship such as James D. Williams’ College English piece “Counterstatement: Autobiography in
Composition Scholarship.” Though he discusses the importance of the personal in the accounts of composition
scholars, Williams ultimately chides the authors of the books under review, stating, “The key topics…must be
pried from the personal history” (211). This simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the value of
personal writing is not uncommon. As a whole, then, this book will analyze some of the origins of conflicting
attitudes toward personal writing and how we can make these disagreements productive in creating new
definitions.
In addition to academic writing, of course, there are many other ways to share personal stories, from casually
recounting our day to our friends to sharing our own learning experiences in the ways we teach and write. In
Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the consumer
nature of the individual American, who naturally takes in the life experiences and stories of others on a daily
basis while offering her own in return. Everything from popular memoir to reality television supports this kind
of life sharing. As Smith and Watson put it, “In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a
life—and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with
consuming the lives that other people have gotten” (3). We rely on personal stories to convey common messages
and relate to one another. From the obsessive imbibing of celebrity gossip to sharing personal experiences in a
conference presentation, we can involve the personal in our leisure activities and in our work. When considering
how we contextualize the work we do in the classroom, it is important to be aware of how we as teachers use
personal writing every day to create life narratives and how our students, whose lives are infused by social
media, have learned to create public life stories.
78
