Perils of the personal (essay)

Among some FYC folk, the personal essay seems to have fallen into disfavor these days, supplanted by that sturdy studly specimen, the thesis-driven argument. I've been trying to think through some of the problems with the standard personal essay assignment: "Describe a significant experience, one that changed you in some way, brought you to some new realization about yourself or your relationship with others or the ways things work in yr world; use the fiction-writers' tools to bring us inside that experience; indulge in a summary fillip of philosophizing about the significance of this transformative event." The results have ranged from the conventional car accidents (in an AAA report I recently read that 25% of drivers get into car accidents their first year of driving; according to my unofficial survey 97% of those believe it was the most significant event of their young lives) to last semester's astonishing collection of psychiatric disorders and abusive situations, legal problems and teenage pregnancies. Some of these essays have been first-rate, but many more have been difficult to respond to or evaluate, either because of students' uninspired choice of topic or seeming inability to remember or at least evoke lived experience or my own queasiness, in some cases, about attaching a grade to such sad stories of personal trauma.

In its most recent incarnation. I have tried for several semesters to give a more focused personal essay assignment, in an attempt to stretch student imaginations a bit beyond those ubiquitous car accident or tragic death stories. A couple semesters back I taught a theme-based comp class with focus on food (on the theory that food is a universal subject, that it could elicit some rich sensory responses, that it intersects cultural, sociological, historical, psychological, scientific "realms"); the personal essay assignment here asked students to write about an experience or aspect of their lives that involved food in some way. This semester, with technology our theme, I asked students to write about some personally significant tool (defined very broadly as a "useful object" that allowed them to do something they couldn't do, or not as well, with their physical bodies alone), the inspiration being Scott Russell Sanders's widely anthologized essay "The Inheritance of Tools." Show-and-tell fashion I brought in my beloved yellow sliderule (the one I actually used in college physics in the unimaginably primitive pre-calculator days; that unwritten essay has to do, perhaps, with the speed of technological change, or more likely my own slide from flunked-out math major to literature and then writing student) and my block plane (symbol of the courage that my brother gave me to try carpentry, with the familiar analogy here: "writing an essay is like building a bookcase") and my great-grandmother's pastry wheel (for an essay, in conceptual-art mode, about the art of pie making, truest test of a good cook in my family, and the links, domestic and otherwise, through five generations of women).

I was overall pleased with the essays I received: from the food course essays about fish cakes and receiving government surplus food and the pleasures of eating burnt cookies with a two-year-old and this semester essays about flour sifters, swimming goggles, the small scale used in a father's drug trade, subjects I doubt many students would have arrived at without the hook, window (choose yr metaphor) I'd provided. Try to fill in the blanks, I told them: I'm writing about _____ in order to write about _____. But still there were, this semester, a fair share of cell phone and computer essays, most from students unwilling or unable to stretch from the familiar to the fresh. (The computer is wonderful because I can use it to IM my friends, do schoolwork, e-shop to my heart's content--see the 5-paragraph possibilities). Tell me something I don't already know, I implored students.

Unsatisfied with some of the rough drafts I got in, I tried again to think through the process myself, to catch myself in the moment of (too grand a word, but) something like inspiration. I stepped back to think of categories of tools: the gardening tools that bring to mind my father, in his garden boots, spading out some azalea or chunk of chrysanthemum to give me, hefting it into a garbage bag for the car ride from his house to mine, scrawling a Latin name and a bit of advice or information (dry site or early blooming) on the manilla tag tied round the bag's neck with garden twine; implements for sewing and cooking and carpentry; microscopes and telescopes and the birdwatcher's binoculars; scissors and knives, guns and fishing poles; finally I came upon...irons. I remembered first a white plastic bottle with pale yellow sprinkler top, used to moisten my father's handkerchiefs before ironing, pre-steam iron days I suppose (as I start to realize just how antique I am). I must have been 10 or 11. I know this because I associate this bottle with the ironing board that folded Murphy-bed-like into my mother's kitchen, in the house we moved to when I was 9. It was a treat to be allowed to do this ironing, something deeply satisfying about seeing those tiny rolled hems pressed flat. From there I remembered learning to sew, a white-and-turquoise kettlecloth dirndl that must have looked dreadful, but how important it was to spend time pressing each of its seams open (there's an analogy buried here to proofreading, or more precisely to the satisfying, sometimes, shift from handwritten to typescripted essay). As a graduate student, my "ironing board" was a pad of folded towels, which brings back memories of that makeshift life, mattresses on the floor, brick-and-board bookcases, overstuffed furniture abandoned by friends moving out of town, night-time scurry of cockroaches across the probably-grimy kitchen floor. Now I have my own ironing board, hauled up from the basement on rare occasions, flipping it on its back to slide its legs open into position, that complaining squeak of resistant metal. And what's this essay about, you ask? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but that's the point. That's what makes it worth my while to write it. What makes me think there's an essay here? I think it's that white-and-yellow bottle, the one that I hadn't remembered I'd remembered.

It seems to me that often those traumatic experiences students reach for when we ask for "significance" (an idea they may have a hard time understanding) have already been sealed up with wrapping tape, either labelled with their neat little "what I learned" message or, more likely, preserved in some archive of wordless emotions. It's often possible to say more with less, I try to convince them.

As for the question of whether these personal essays belong in the FYC curriculum at all, a few thoughts and questions.

• Some students who can write perfectly competent expository or argumentative essays will struggle with this assignment. To what degree is it fair to penalize them (how much do I hate grading writing? let me count the ways) for their "failure" to recognize the rich material in their own lives? Other students, who might not be immediately recognizable as skilled writers, will have that knack of seeing a subject (or somehow a more obvious treasure trove of material). The personal essay assignment has the potential to give such students a great deal of confidence. Is it appropriate to have a course objective that we don't expect every student to master? Is there a sense in which course objectives need not be universal?


• To what degree is it our purpose (our sole purpose, a primary purpose, one purpose among many) to prepare students for entry into the "academic discourse community"? At the community college especially, where some (how many?) of our students don't have this goal, this is a question that demands some thought.


• For students who have internalized the 5-para. theme structure, might the personal essay assignment serve as a corrective of sorts? Ditto for students who think they must adopt the mask of objectivity in their writing (the "never write in the 1st person" camp). Can privileging the personal (even for students not too comfortable in its garb) help to convince them of the possibility/desirability of staking out a personal position in all their writing?


• In the article "My Crowd" (Harper's, March 2006), Bill Wasik divulges his responsibility for the flash mob phenomenon. (Interesting sidenote: Unfamiliar with the term flash mob, and actually not entirely sure the whole idea wasn't a parody, I checked my students' favorite source of infallible info, Wikipedia. A full summary and link to the Harper's article had already been posted.) He writes about the concept of deindividuation, which it seems to me is increasingly part of our social climate (mass media being an easy target for this, but no doubt there are other factors as well). I'm not really a fan of the cultural studies camp, but there does seem to me some almost-moral responsibility educators should feel to combat these forces of deindividuation. Personal essays are a step in this direction.


• Finally, and maybe perversely, I tell my students: OK, if you don't like this personal writing, confined to the contents of your memory banks, the present contents of yr skull, your only other alternative is ...go out and get some new information. That is, RESEARCH!

Comments

[Jason]

I have a stack of personal narrative essays to grade over Spring break, so this is a particularly interesting post. I don't see argumentative and expository assignments and more personal/narrative assignments as mutually exclusive. I assign both types of writing in my composition course (I use John Trimbur's "The Call to Write"). I assign a memoir and profile assignment together, focusing on the fact that both genres employ narrative and description in ways that writers typically can't when using more academic forms of argument and exposition. Students who don't feel comfortable with personal writing can choose the profile. Usually, though, 95% of my students choose to write the memoir. And since the assignment follows a couple of more traditional academic essays, students find the memoir assignment a nice change.

I'll have to think more about the memoir assignment in the context of a larger social trend toward deindividuation. It does seem to me that students (at least in most of their college courses) are not encouraged to draw connections between their lives/experiences and the academic subjects that they're studying.

[Holly]

I agree that the personal and expo/arg "modes" aren't mutually exclusive (that is, that both can/should be included in a comp class, and, in fact, I'm probably especially drawn to the idea of straddling the two/three modes within one assignment). I guess I was responding to the sense I get from some of my colleagues that the more personal writing, in their view, may not be so relevant to their main goal in a comp class: thesis-driven argument. There was an interesting strand related to this whole debate on Mike Edwards's Vitia a while back: http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2005/03/31/personal-writing-theory-and-method/

I'd never thought about the idea of giving students the choice of "how personal" an approach they wanted to take. That's an interesting approach. Do you have other such pairings you use? I'm a bit surprised that so many opt for the personal; I sense that about half my students aren't really comfortable with mining their life for subject matter.

I'm curious about the rationale behind yr sequencing of assignments. It seems often the personal essay comes first in classes, and that's how I've generally taught it myself, but I sometimes wonder if it might be better positioned a bit later in the course.

As for the deindividuation bit, I agree with yr observation that students are not often encouraged to draw connections between the personal experiences and the academic studies they're studying, but you think they should be, right? (I'm trying to decide if I would argue that making those connections should be the root of any education in the humanities...)

[Jason]

I decided to teach academic before personal this semester simply as an experiment. I've usually followed the more conventional path of beginning with more personal forms of writing and moving towards more academic forms of writing.

I didn't think you were saying that the personal and academic were mutually exclusive. I was responding what I see as the prevailing convention to give academic writing greater weight and view personal writing as less relevant. I think from the perspective of some teachers personal writing seems like an artifact of the 70s or something (like bell bottoms; though, aren't they making a comeback as well?).

I'm interested more and more in getting students to somehow combine the academic and the personal (which is, I think, what your assignment gets at). That is, I want them to think about their personal experiences, but I want them to be able to situate their account of their personal experiences within a larger social context. I want them to be able to make connections between their experiences and larger (even academic) arguments about culture and society. Or something like that.

A very interesting post, btw. It's helping me rethink this memoir assignment. Are you also a contributor to Community College English?

[Deb]

I've had this post marked "keep new" on Bloglines because a.) it's so beautifully written (I especially love the part about the tools you considered writing about); and b.) it resonates with things I've been thinking about in regards to personal writing; and c.) I love your idea about providing the "hook" or "window" for students' own writing.

Also, I love this line: "And what's this essay about, you ask? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but that's the point. That's what makes it worth my while to write it." I've tried to get that same idea--that sense of discovery, of urgency but also patience--across to students, but they so often seem frightened by it.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Really just wanted to say: I loved this post!

[Holly]

Thanks so much for the comments (and compliments)! I had originally started this blog in the hopes of getting some dialogue going within my dept, the failure of which was a semi-dismal disappointment. That coupled with some family issues last year stopped my blogging for a while, though I've been an active lurker (if that's not an oxymoron) for a few years now. Anyway, I'm absolutely delighted to have a few readers. I'm not a contributor to CCE right now, Jason, but that's one of the steps I was thinking of making out into the world a bit...

[Deb]

I think you'd be a great contributor to CCE! Email Joanna Howard, and I'm sure she'll set you up!