I should add, though, that all of the essays I assign are personal in some sense because I encourage students to position themselves in every essay they write for my class. When they arrive at a more typical personal essay (”write about your own experience”), there’s no surprise and they understand that every essay must be grounded in something real and concrete.

Most of this evolution in my paper assignments has come from my experience of reading way too many hackneyed papers like the ones you, Mike, and others above describe: my favorite grandmother, the time I stole something from Kmart and learned a lesson, what it was like to make it to the varsity baseball team, etc. Ick. I hated writing them and I hate reading them. Reflective essays, however, I love reading and still enjoy writing–I think it builds the habit, too, of being self-critical. In fact, this semester when they turn in papers, I’ve had students write an introductory note of a paragraph or so that reflects on how they feel about the current draft. What process did they go through? What still needs work? Of what are they most proud? I’ve enjoyed the responses so far.

Lastly, I let students revise all but one essay for their final portfolio, allowing them to leave one essay behind (because there’s always one that doesn’t “work” as well as the others).

Great discussion–thanks!

When I assign the personal essay later in the semester, after they have read and worked with texts and thought about things, it is inevitably better.

Onward and upward.

(Mike, I know you must be sick and tired of Wordpress-tweaking, but if you decide to do some more of it soon, would you consider installing a module that would give us a preview option before posting comments?)

That said, all writing is personal. All good writing conveys a sense of the person who produced it, including good academic writing. The writer must always negotiate her stance with the material and the audience.

And I think the reason Mike’s students are finding it difficult to make the move to more analytical prose is because that’s what they don’t know and they are now learning. Students faced with an assignment they aren’t sure of frequently go back to strategies that have worked in the past. I had this happen with some students at UC Berkeley 15 years ago when I did a semester there. I interviewed a segment of these students late in the term. I asked them why, in the face of very explicit written direction, they had not written the paper assigned. Almost every one that did this said, “I didn’t really understand what you wanted, but I knew how to do the other kind of paper (essentially a 5-paragraph dealie).”

Good discussion. Greetings from Indy!

I like the personal essay if it goes beyond the merely personal; if not, it certainly risks the kind of teacherly-demand-of-authentic-emotional-experience described by Clancy and MrBS. In the issue of College English that showed up in my mailbox today, Julie Lindquist describes the problematic ways in which asking for authentic “emotional responses for the purposes of academic rewards becomes, for students, a matter of producing the ‘money shot’ on demand” and offers the example of the canny writing student who spins a wholly fictional “tragic account of his friend’s car accident and death” (197) to please his teacher. And Joe Harris acknowledges that certain varieties of the personal essay make grading into little more than a gut check: you either like the student self represented on the page or you don’t. But then, Lindquist also talks about the ways we tend to privilege rational analysis and devalue emotion and affect, in much the same way that Suzanne Clark problematized composition’s distaste for sentiment several years ago, and I think the argument that we ought give value to the personal and emotional in our assignments just as we give value to the academic and the rational is a powerful argument.

Clancy, you asked about sources — the big one, I think, is Peter’s exchange with David Bartholomae in the February 1995 CCC; his introduction to Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing is also worth a look, as is “Closing My Eyes as I Speak (College English January 1987). It’s been observed that Peter’s so-called ‘expressivism’ builds significantly on James Britton’s ideas about discourse in Language and Learning, which makes the most compelling case I’ve seen for the value of personal writing.

And yes, many if not most essays started out as painfully self-absorbed paeans to ME ME ME in various ways. Some were stunning in their insightfulness, and the point, in retrospect, always seemed to be not so much to tell a story, but to own the telling, warts and all. Lots of students didn’t get it–didn’t understand how their experiences could or should be up for revision and evaluation. A few of them got it, and that was usually enough. At my last gig, though, I pretty quickly ended up with sections of Advanced Expository Writing (juniors & seniors) and no FY Comp at all. I used Ways of Reading for that, which brought a whole new raft of fun.

In that post, you articulated what could be a problem with almost any kind of pedagogy, though.