"I"-Opening

Personal Writing by My First-Year College Students

“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Inside the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy.” --Mark Twain

For the last five years, I’ve been asking students in my first-year college writing courses to compose short personal essays in which their own experiences—or those of others they know well—take center stage. They read personal essays by published authors to serve as inspiration, and then they write their own. The results have been fascinating. Thanks to my students’ willingness to explore their lives on the page, I feel far more connected to them than I did before, and while I used to dread a stack of student essays, I now look forward to reading them.

(I’ll address the issue of Artificial Intelligence in another post, but for now I’ll say this: To keep A.I. out of the picture, I have my students write their essays in class and offline.)

There are several reasons why I switched to assigning personal essays instead of academic papers, chief among them my awareness that most of my students have no intention of becoming scholars. The kind of writing they’ll do once they’re employed is hard to predict, but a large majority won’t end up writing academic articles for fellow specialists, and I gradually lost interest in requiring them to use a discourse in which they have little investment.

Nor do I think the writing they do for my first-year course should be tied to preparing them for what they’ll be ask to write in other college courses. There’s no telling what those courses will require of them—only that the range will be wide—which makes the notion of writing as prep for whatever comes next exceedingly hard to gauge. More to the point, as I see it, is to consider what students need now, which, if wisely pursued, might end up helping them down the road as well. But it’s the present I want to emphasize.

And what do first-year college students need as writers? I believe they need a different relationship to writing. Or at least that’s what I believe about my students at the University of Virginia, who arrive well-schooled in writing five-paragraph themes and exam-driven essays that involve identifying a thesis and defending it with “examples,” all while largely ignoring counter-examples that would question their perspective. My students can produce such essays quickly and efficiently, but most of them say they find the process deadening. They don’t enjoy writing, they don’t find it fulfilling—but they do know how to produce what standardized test-makers call “proficient” writing on demand. They’ve been doing it for years, and they expect they’ll have to do more of it in college.

This is why I’m more concerned with their relationship to writing than with having them continue to manufacture polished pieces of writing. From what I’ve found, asking them to write about their own lives (or what they’ve observed in the life of a friend or family member) has the effect of pushing a reset button: suddenly students start to care about what they write in a different way, not just for earning a grade but also for working through a personal problem that matters to them. By asking them to focus on internal or external conflicts they’ve confronted (with their parents, siblings, bodies, schools, beliefs, etc.), my assignments encourage students to think on the page about issues that affect their daily lives. I tell them I’m less interested in a gleaming product than in depth of thought, which means pushing themselves to challenge the commonplaces and cliches they generally rely on to interpret their experience.

The results are often messy. My students’ essays don’t begin with a thesis, and their thinking may be contradictory as they attempt to come to terms with a personal struggle. I’ve read about students who fear their families will stop speaking to them if word gets home that they’re gay; students who’ve lost a parent to cancer or a sibling to suicide; students who live with a disease or disability that presents them with daily challenges; students who come from poverty and feel out of place among wealthy, cosmopolitan peers; students who feel imprisoned by their attachment to social media but don’t know how to escape it; and many other situations that make their lives stressful. By far the most common essays are those written by young female students who’ve spent their teens struggling with eating disorders—a remarkably widespread occurrence despite all the recent talk about body positivity.

I’m not a therapist, and I don’t tell students what to do with their lives (though I’ve often recommended the campus counseling center). My job is to ask questions that will lead to deeper thinking—thinking they can pursue through writing, the most disciplined form of thinking I know. I believe it can make a difference—because so many students say it does—for them to write about their lives and encounter readers (their teacher and classmates) who are ready to listen.

My students will have many opportunities throughout their years of college to write academic papers in their literature, philosophy, history, religious studies, and social science courses, along with whatever writing assignments they complete in STEM courses. Learning to write as these disciplines require will be good for them, for it will help them develop precision and flexibility as writers and thinkers.

But in my first-year courses, I want to offer students something else: a place to reflect—in a voice that’s colloquial, not formal—on the lives they’re living at present. I am far from the first to suggest they do so. When I entered the profession long ago, Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Lad Tobin, Wendy Bishop, and many others were encouraging writing teachers to consider the value of personal writing in first-year college courses, but I went in another direction. I don’t think I was wrong to do so, nor do I think others should assign personal writing just because I currently find it meaningful for my academically well-prepared students at UVA. Every institution and every course requires its own pedagogical decisions.

In closing, I’ll note that a colleague once objected that students spend all day writing about themselves while texting or engaging with social media—so shouldn’t school turn their attention elsewhere? Of course it should. But I don’t equate the writing they do on their phones with the nuanced, extended thinking found in a personal essay. There’s room for all kinds of writing in a four-year college education, self-reflective inquiry among them. I’ve found it a good place for first-year students to start.