The importance of the personal

What a pleasure to meet with all of you in conference this week.  With very few exceptions, you all put in a good effort on your research essay drafts, and many of you experimented with new approaches that were inspired by our discussions so far this semester. When pressed, many of you said that what was different about these research essays was that they were more "personal," and this is something I'd like to look at a little more closely.

For many of you, "more personal" meant that you did two things you don't usually do in academic writing:  use the first person and include personal experience and observation.  Both moves, of course, are quite common in popular writing, especially creative nonfiction, but less common in academic writing.  We talked in the beginning of the semester about "rules of evidence," and how these change depending on the level of expertise of a writer's audience.  Popular writing has pretty loose rules--information can come from a range of sources, including personal experience--and formal academic writing has stricter rules--often evidence must come from "authoritative" sources or experimental data. (By the way, you might be surprised that some academic writing does use the first person, but that's another story).

So depending on what you're writing and for whom, you will make the rhetorical decision about whether to say "I" or use relevant personal experience.  This semester, we're writing for a general audience.

But there are other reasons to "get personal" that will help you as an academic writer.

First, all writing is personal.  Even the most formal academic prose uses language that can never be "objective" because language itself is always socially constructed--shaped by temporary (and often contested) agreements about what a word means.  But on a less theoretical level, writing is personal because it always reflects your particular interests, the way you think, the questions you ask, the things you emphasize, and so on.  So consider that nearly everything you, even if it doesn't use "I," is personal.  This foray into personal writing also reinforces an idea that we've discussed this semester:  that everything we write is "narrated" by us--we are the guiding hand, leading readers through our thinking, the information we think is important to understand, and so on.  Finally, when we do experiment with borrowing a few techniques of storytelling in our informational and persuasive writing, we access a kind of thinking--narrative thinking--that focuses our attention on things we tend to ignore in thesis-driven, hierarchical logic: context.  Narrative thinking (and inquiry) suggests that the way we can understand things is to look closely at who an idea exists in the world we live in, a complex and interesting place.  Some academic disciplines  (business, nursing, anthropolgy, etc.) make this a research focus through things like case study and ethnography.

What I hope you see is that this experiment with the personal isn't just an "creative" Englishy thing but a relevant writing and intellectual practice, one that should help you as a student as you move forward.