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Abstract:
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The question of the appropriateness and effectiveness of students' personal writing is a longstanding one in the academy . In composition studies , the ideological fight over personal and academic writing is most often represented by the oft -studied but rarely changed Bartholomae /Elbow debate . In literary studies , reader -response critics in particular have wrestled with the problems and possibilities of subjective interpretation . Yet despite scholastic interest in issues of personal writing , discussions have remained primarily theoretical and have relied mainly on anecdotal evidence . While small -scale case studies valuably illuminate the processes of an individual student or two , the conversation would be profoundly bolstered by empirical data . How common are personal responses , really ? Further , while many believe that any presence of first -person pronouns signals personal , subjective writing , anecdotal cases suggest that there are several categories of personal writing , and that these different types of expressivism produce a range of rhetorical effects . The current study attempts to name and refine these categories - -using the distinctions of General claim , Writer -based prose , Personal experience , and Personal claim—to begin to fill in this empirical gap . Is it a mistake to lump all use of personal reference into the category of "personal writing" ? Would helping students distinguish between these varying types of personal references inform their stylistic and rhetorical choices ? By reviewing a sample of 30 short papers written by college students in a general requirement literature survey course , I will examine how frequently - -and in what ways - -students reference themselves when responding in writing to a work of literature . |