In this age of standardized testing and the emphasis on argument and critical thinking, personal writing can sometimes be pushed into the back seat. But teaching personal writing has many benefits for students and teachers as well. I listed several here, you may even be able to come up with others. First, students are more likely to care about the topic. Most of us are naturally interested in ourselves and our own lives. Many studies have shown that students will work harder on and take more pride in and care more about writing that they're doing if they're interested in the topic. With personal writing, students are the content expert when it comes to their own lives. They may not be expert at understanding their experiences or writing them down, but they know more about their own lives than anyone else. As a result, they do not need to worry about anyone telling them that their ideas are wrong. That doesn't mean there can't be critical response to a personal essay, but that response will be based on how effectively the writer has presented the experience, not on whether the writer is able to come up with the correct answers. Students can conduct research in ways that are easier and more familiar to them. As I mentioned previously, for a student conducting research for a personal essay, the main library is the writer's memories. They can also speak with family members and friends who might know about the experience. If they do end up doing additional more traditional research, it will be targeted research they are engaging in because they understand that they need more information to make their writing complete. Additional benefits. Primarily because of the previous points, personal essay writing provides a strong opportunity to teach students the different steps in the writing process. Students can practice prewriting by working through the many low-risk exercises, exploring possible topics and techniques, and considering questions like why is this topic important to me? Students can also practice revision with their personal essays. As once again, studies have shown that the more students care about a particular writing, the more likely they are to want to engage in revising it. Teachers can help students learn many of the techniques of good writing through personal writing. Because the content of the personal essay will be coming mainly from the student's own memory and experience. There's a greater opportunity to focus on the quality of the writing. To a large degree, the success of a personal essay depends as much or more on how it's told rather than what is told. Strong voice, engaging style, organization, clarity, sentence structure, word choice, and specific techniques like narrative and description and the making of meaning can all be taught through the personal essay. Another benefit, students can work through issues and questions they have about their own experience. Students can come to terms with experiences and emotions they may still be trying to process in their lives. They can gain distance on a new perspective, reflect on what their experiences might mean to them, and how to better understand themselves in relation to those experiences. They can see their own growth and learning by considering what they know and think now, compared to what they knew and thought and did in a past time. I had a student in first-year writing in college, who in a journal entry in the first to four or five weeks of class, wrote about being bulimic. But when she turned the journal in, she folded the page over and wrote a note asking me not to read it. I gave students that options if they felt the writing was too personal. Three or four weeks later, she wrote about the same topic, and this time she specifically asked me to read it, near the end of the semester when students had a choice about what type of paper they would write as their final paper. The student asked me if it was alright, if she wrote an essay about her struggles with bulimia'. I told her, of course it was all right, if she felt comfortable enough to do that. She not only wrote the essay, which was beautifully written, she volunteered to read it to the whole class on our last day. Working through questions and issues about themselves and their own experiences. Not only helps students better understand themselves, it can make them braver and stronger. Additional benefits of personal writing. Personal essays empower students by showing them that writing is a series of choices that they themselves control. Have they said enough? Have they used the right word? These choices are no longer seen as arbitrary, but rather are decisions that the writer has made and that the writer can change. The writer, not the teacher, is the only one who has access to material, to evaluate what more might need to be said. Personal essays help teachers get to know their students. Students will be telling their stories about experiences that are important to them. Particularly if personal essays are assigned early in the semester or school year. Teachers will learn about their students far earlier than they might otherwise. In some cases, they might learn important things about some students that they might never have discovered otherwise. I mentioned previously in the characteristics of personal writing that sometimes in a personal essay, the writer will tell the reader something that they wouldn't tell another human being through conversation. That sense of intimacy. Personal essays are easy to teach. There lots of metatexts available for students of all ages and the rubric, as I mentioned in the previous video can be very straightforward and simple. Finally, perhaps the most important benefit of personal essay writing, personal writing creates empathy. When students are able to show other students, this is what it was like to be me, the result can be feelings of compassion and understanding on the part of readers. Sharing personal writing can lead to the two distinct types of empathy: affective empathy, which is that feeling of compassion, and cognitive empathy, which is an intellectual understanding of what someone else is thinking and feeling. Reading a personal essay by Amy Tan provides students who are not familiar with Asian-American cultures, first of all, a sense of what life might be like within that culture. At the same time, these essays could help readers unfamiliar with another culture realize that regardless of the culture we were raised in, we all share similar emotions and hopes, and fears. We learn that some of the details of how people live in different cultures might be different but we also see that the essence of who we are as human beings is very much the same. Further, when readers feel empathy with the writer of a particular essay, they also are practicing a new perspective taking practice they might employ in other instances. When they meet someone new or different, for instance, instead of leaping to a judgment, they might ask themselves, "I wonder what it's like to be them." In addition, personal writing can be a great first step toward transactional writing. An essay about my parents' courtship after World War II, I had to research. My father had been in India, China, and Burma, my mother had worked out a photography studio job, she left as soon as the war ended. All of that led me to do research about that era. Other ways to start with the personal and move to the transitional include informational or instructional writing. You might ask students, what do you love to do? What do you know how to do because you work so hard to learn it and then share that knowledge or writing argument. What are things that affect you and your life personally that might be changed, done away with, or improved upon? When I wrote that story about my parents, I was focused particularly on my mother and I could have taken that essay and looked into women in the workforce during the war and how that changed once the war was over. My mother ended up becoming a homemaker and for much of her life, she seemed to regret that she hadn't had a real chance at having a career. That could be a way of starting with the personal and taking it into the transactional. A Middle school language arts teacher in the Johns Hopkins teaching writing program wrote the following about the benefits she saw in teaching a personal narrative writing assignment to her students. When engaged in personal writing, she said students care more. Middle-school is an age in which students' social and emotional lives often eclipsed their academic lives. They are in the process of figuring out who they are, who they want to be, and how to navigate relationships with their friends, family, and peers. This is often a time of great growth and great turmoil. As such, many eighth grade students favorite subject is themselves and their lives. Many also desperately need to process what is going on and this writing assignment gives them a reason to do so, so they pour themselves into it. Students work harder. It makes sense that if students care more, they will work harder in their reflections about which writing assignment they were proud of and which best showed their strengths as a writer, this idea came up again and again. "I worked very hard on it," one wrote, "I worked really hard on it. I worked so long and hard on it." If students are not willing to work hard, they will not be motivated to substantially revise their writing. Students have more to say. Several students also commented that their personal essay was the longest essay they had ever written. Having more source material, for instance, their personal experience led to longer essays which was useful for exercising their writing muscles and also gave them more material to revise. Students are already experts on the content. Students are the definitive experts on their lives. This is helpful in two distinct ways: one is that it reduces anxiety about the writing, they do not have to worry about being judged for misinterpreting a source or drawing an incorrect conclusion. The other is that they already know their content intimately, which allows them to focus more energy on specific writing choices. When my eighth grade students write an expository or argumentative modes, most of the writing energy is spent on generating, evaluating, and organizing the content. Many students do not have much energy left over to focus on specific diction or syntax choices. Telling a story is more intuitive, so students have more bandwidth left to focus on deliberate writing choices, such as vivid or precise word choice, sentence length, or adding or deleting details. Finally, they can authentically revision their stories. One advantage of approaching writing as a process is that students can write their way to a new insight. While it is possible and even ideal to have this happen across all types of writing, it is my experience that eighth grade students are much more likely to discover new insights through the process of writing personal essays than analytical essays. This helps to create student buy-in about the power of writing, lead to new understandings, and it also gives students opportunities to try out more sweeping revisions. That's one middle school teacher's take on the value of personal writing.
