integrating “personal” and textual sources

I was thinking: When we require students — as we do here in WR 121 — to write a paper which integrates two textual sources and one personal source, isn’t that actually a more difficult assignment than had we required them to integrate three textual sources? In other words, doesn’t adding personal experience/knowledge to the [...]

second drafting

I’ve been working all day on the second draft of my review of the literature (for my paper on whether/how much personal experience ought to be assigned in first-year writing courses), except for the nap I took between 3:30 and 5:30, and I don’t think I’m half finished. Papers that are this heavily-sourced are just [...]

most effective discourse = purposeful combination of experience and information

“Rather than privileging either experience or information as sources of subject matter, we should encourage students to use both. It is, I believe, this purposeful combination of experience and information that produces the most effective discourse.”
Jeanette Harris, Expressive Discourse (166-167)
The purposeful combination sounds like assignments that mix external sources and personal experience, like the [...]

3:23am do I know where my brain is?

3:23am I decided I’d done enough (it’s a complete draft plus works cited) for this lit review. It was funny: I decided to check my email and I had just gotten an email from Travis (another first-year Writing and Rhetoric MA) saying it was 3:21a and he was going to bed with five pages [...]

more to get from library

Bartholomae, David. “A Reply to Stephen North.” PRE/TEXT 11 (1-2): 121-130.
Bishop, Wendy. “Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition.” CCC 51 (1999): 9-31.
Bizzell, Patricia. “College Composition: Initiation in the Academic Discourse Community.” Curriculum Inquiry 12 (1982): 191-207.
Bizzell, Patricia. “The Intellectual Work of “Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourse.” Alt-Dis: Alternative Discourses in the Academy eds. [...]

“Managing the Personal in the Writing Classroom”

Just found this at the Dartmouth Writing Program website. Ah, a middle ground in the debate… After all, there are two letters in the alphabet between “B” [for Bartholomae] and “E” [for Elbow]. :-)

Managing the Personal in the Writing Classroom
The Place of the Personal in the Writing Classroom
Discussion of the proper role of [...]

personal experience on Mars

Okay, I need to get down to writing my literature review, but first I want to get down some thoughts.
The “personal” in academic writing… Assuming “personal” more or less equates to “personal experience,” then the main reason it has a difficult time being accepted in academic circles is because it gets equated with anecdotal evidence. [...]

get from library

additions to bibliography:
Berthoff, Ann E. “What Works? How Do We Know?” Journal of Basic Writing 12.2 (1993) 3-17.
Elliot, Norbert. “Narrative Discourse and the Basic Writer.” Journal of Basic Writing 14.2 (1995): 19-30.
PE1404.J68

WR 511 Project Proposal (including bibliography and 2 preces)

October 24, 2007
Major Project Proposal
I have chosen to research and discuss the use of personal or expressive writing assignments in college first-year and basic writing courses. I plan to write for teachers of first-year and basic writing.
The debate as to the role of personal/expressive writing in a composition classroom probably began in [...]

notes on Peter Elbow’s “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues” (1991)

Notes on Peter Elbow’s “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues” (College English 53.2 (1991): 135-155)
Elbow argues for need to teach nonacademic in addition to academic discourse in first-year writing courses.
1. “life is long and college is short”
n He says employers complain that students [...]