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RE: Big Yes for Formulaic Writing
Faculty in our Nursing and PT departments have faced the same questions
since so much writing in their field often does not include the personal
or at least doesn't admit to including it. A couple of years ago in the
_Yale Review_, an excellent personal essay chronicled the experiences of
the writer and her sister in dealing with serious health-related events.
She told of how medical professionals had responded or failed to respond
at times to her own disease as well as to her sister in dealing with her
children's disabling diseases. When I came upon that essay, I mentioned
it to the chair of PT. He read it and later it became required reading in
both the PT and the Nursing department for students early in their
program. The faculty purpose was two-fold; a) to remind the medical
students of crucial issues facing them as professionals from the patient
side; and b) to serve as a model for legitmate and necessary personal
anecdote/essay within the medical field.
Nursing department faculty also require journals of their students for
recording how personal experience relates to their medical training.
But in all cases, I often wonder if the present atmosphere for recognizing
personal experience as legitimate and credible in academic and
professional writing will eventually make al of this a rather more natural
process?
Some time ago we briefly discussed use of the personal within essays and
I'm afriad that it is yet confused with "confessional" at times. We
perceive the world and learning through the personal, through experience.
When I read essays like Paula Gillespie's in Yancey's _Voice on Voice_ and
find the personal entering in to affirm or posit academic concepts or
theories, I find the writing immediately engaging, interesting, and down
to earth. This seems a fine model.
Katie
On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Lerner, Neal wrote:
> 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
> >
>
>