Functions of the personal, reflective essay as academic writing.

Abstract

Personal writing is offered as a focus for an alternative rhetoric for college composition. Students' academic writing may be grounded in critical reflection upon their own experiences. Academic discourse has been shaped by the current and traditional dominance of exposition over other modes of writing. Students set forth information without indicating how it has been personally constituted. The expository writing process shapes all forms of writing learned in school. So long as this process remains invisible, the critically reflective academic potential of the narrative mode in particular will remain unknown. Chapter One examines the epistemic bases of the expository writing process in the rhetoric of Alex and er Bain. Current process approaches are shown as merely updating the writing process implied in Bain's explanations of the four modes and how to produce them. Chapter Two reprints and evaluates five student essays. Written in the mode of thick description, the second chapter identifies features that make the essays personal and explores the academic functions of those texts. These functions include: reassessing; remembering; constructing experience; re-searching over experience; creating form; explaining; learning; expressing oneself (in reader-based prose); and struggling. With its focus upon what students actually write when assigned personal essays, and upon the teacher's interpretations and responses, this chapter is intended to suggest ways of responding to personal essays as academic writing. Chapter Three argues for teaching personal writing and in particular for teaching narrative as a critical mode of writing. Chapter Three examines bases both in theory and in my own experiences for claiming academic value for the functions and other features identified in the student writings of the second chapter. Chapters Two and Three constitute the dissertation as research into the teaching process in composition. As teachers learn to identify and respond to personal and potentially critical features of a student's text, they will build a reflective rhetoric for the composition classroom.