RE: Big Yes for Formulaic Writing

["Lerner, Neal" <NLerner@mcp.edu>]

Steve, you present a convincing argument for teaching students the
personal essay as a vehicle for critical and creative thinking (and in
the interest of full disclosure, I need to say that Steve was my boss
for two years before I came to my present workplace--how's it going,
Steve?!).

Composition here--in a "professional" health-care-related
curriculum--mainly focuses on writing from sources.  The personal essay
is not assigned in FYC, as far as I know.  I try to fill that gap in my
own classes with journal writing, but that falls short.  At other
places, I've tried to use an assignment sequence of students writing a
personal essay, a comparison of two sources, and an argument essay on a
single topic.  If it goes well, elements of the personal essay will
filter throughout the other two (and I don't require students to write
the personal essay first--not all are most comfortable with rendering
experience). 

Still, it can be quite difficult to help students with personal writing
in certain instances.  For example, there's the "conversion" essay or
the account of their finding Jesus.  And then there are students who'd
prefer not to write about their experiences, often because the
experiences were too horrible.  How do you and others deal with these
situations?

Neal

Neal Lerner
Mass. College of Pharmacy & Allied Health Sciences
nlerner@mcp.edu; 617-732-2824

> ----------
> From: 	Profsteven@aol.com
> Reply To: 	wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu
> Sent: 	Tuesday, June 2, 1998 6:46 AM
> To: 	wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu
> Subject: 	RE: Big Yes for Formulaic Writing
> 
> I agree that elevating Bacon's concept of the essay's function and
> structure
> to the point of exclusive model short circuits students'writing.
> 
> One of the powerful pedagological aspects of teaching students to
> write
> personal essays is that it frees students from 5-¶ structure and from
> assumptions that every essay must be thesis-driven or highlight the
> thesis in
> ¶1.
> 
> The perceived (I should say the "misperceived") problem of teaching
> personal
> essay writing is that "it's only personal" and most of us talk about
> personal
> essays as the starting place for learning how to write academically.
> But I'm
> convinced that writing personal essays are a positive force throughout
> writing
> instruction. We need to teach students to read published personal
> essays with
> as much analytical thought and with as much questioning of artistic
> merit as
> they do poems and fiction.  I'm convinced that writing personal essays
> that
> reach beyond "what happened to me" or "what I think"--i.e., personal
> essays
> taht establish the global significance of the experience or thought,
> that
> incorporate the student's readings and musing from other courses as
> well as
> from our classes--such writing illustrates in a most powerful and
> productive
> way the allure of reading and writing essays, the "exploring" that
> essays are
> based on originally.
> 
> Do other colleges teach whole courses on personal writing and personal
> essays?
> What have you discovered about students' ability to structure material
> etc.?
> In my classes, I've found that students at first flounder and feel
> totally
> insecure that a prescribed form doesn't exist for personal essays,
> then most
> of them feel liberated and some actually explore new structures.  
> 
> The question some of my colleagues ask is, "But how does writing a
> personal
> essay help students write academic papers?"  The answer, I think, is
> that
> writing personal essays that are crafted essays filled with artistic
> decisions
> and selections and amplification is the best training possible for
> finding the
> structure inherent in a topic (rather than imposed from outside) and
> learning
> to value one's sense of a topic.  I must also add that I require
> students to
> move beyond the merely personal--to lose forever the idea that a
> personal
> essay is merely a typed journal entry--and to discover the essence of
> the
> experience, idea, etc.
> 
> What experiences have you had with the form?
> 
> Steve Strang
> MIT
>