Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Discovering a Personal Essay Colleague
Today, I was quite happy to discover that one of my R&C colleagues in our department has a deep appreciation for the personal academic essay. I asked Dr. Diana Cardenas to visit my autobiography class and talk about one of her personal academic essays that she wrote for an edited collection, Latino/a Discourses. Some of you may be familiar with this essay since she has spoken about it in other classes. She usually discusses it from a more conventional R&C approach, but I asked her today to talk about how she crafted the essay. I always thought it was a wonderful essay, and I wanted students to hear the process she went through for writing it up. Many of them had her for technical writing, so they saw a style of writing that differed in certain ways from what she emphasized in these classes. She was asked to contribute to this collection on Latino/a literacy, so she had to speak to the theme of the collection. She thought it would be easy to write this personal academic essay as many of us often do when we initially start writing in this form. However, she soon realized the seemingly simple was not so simple. Seven months later she finally finished her essay after countless revisions. As she said this, a number of students fervently nodded their heads in recognition of the time consuming nature of personal essays. They knew what she knew. I remember she mentioned the discovery of using questions in her essay to engage the reader and to create these pauses for mutual reflection. Sometimes when we teach argumentative or technical writing, we tell our students that we don't want readers to stop and pause. To stop and pause might inhibit the smooth argument. We emphasize the use of smooth transitions, so we won't jolt the reader. Yet, with essays, we embrace those little jolts dispersed in our writing. These are inviting jolts that sometimes ask the reader to participate in the wondering process or merely to share what we're wondering about at that moment. Those questions also can strengthen our essay argument. They might be signposts for another digression as our questions take us in a different direction. Are the questions sometimes then the essay's version of signposts? I'll have to ponder this question.
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2 comments:
This was a good post to read as I'm continuing in writing my personal academic essay. One of the hardest parts for me is how to integrate my personal narrative with the academic part. As discussed in our conference, I have some work to do on that front. But some little "jolts" here and there might work to a certain effect, so that helps ease up some of the anxiety. Dr. Cardenas's article is so seamless and smooth that it's easy to assume that it just flowed easily. Knowing that it took her seven months to craft that essay makes me feel better about spending four hours on a couple of pages only to scrap half of it.
I like the idea of questions as signposts. It makes it seem like we are less likely to get "lost" in the personal essay!
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