The instructor for my Comparative Literature 122 class bounded in, fresh from his own set of classes as a PhD student in the department. His energy caught the attention of us all as our heads swiveled, wide-eyed, to focus on the assignment that he was immediately handing out. “Write about the best thing that ever happened to you,” the sheet of paper said. The only research required was to dig through memories to find that one thing that was the “best.” No library visits. No Internet research. All I had to do was explore where I had been and write about it. Without realizing it at the time, one of my first college assignments in this first year writing course sent me off on a path of exploring my experiences and ideas through writing – a path that would wind throughout my college career. It is through writing that I have been able to synthesize personal experiences in a fluid, thoughtful way, and use them to support a sustained inquiry.

 

Quick flash back to high school where my five paragraph essays were perfected. Arguments were made based on research from books at the library (because in the early-2000s, print books were still more valid sources of information that the internet). Writing was a way to convey an argument through meticulous supporting details from sources other than oneself. My writing was logical and devoid of thoughtful exploration and passion.  Flash forward to college when my thinking about the writing process started to shift. Suddenly, essay assignments prompted me to look to my personal experiences as evidence to support an inquiry. I learned about the form of the personal essay and how to approach a prompt in an immersion journalism style. I began to use writing as a way to reflect on my personal experiences, past and present. The writing process itself was encouraged as a mode of self-discovery.

 

The shift from an argumentative style of writing based on external research to a more personal style of investigation was slow to change, however. A year after I first took my first year writing course, I sat in English 225: Academic Argumentation. The focus of the class was on honing the ability to make an academic argument in a structured, convincing way. The styles taught were stiff, focused on external sources as evidence, and simply underscored what I had been exposed to in high school. My personal experiences were pushed the wayside as I scoured the library and web for objective sources. When I wrote a paper entitled, “The Contemporary Dating Scene: Are There Rituals of Dating?” I used the film “He’s Just Not That Into You” as well has a handful of articles from the fields of psychology and sociology to argue that there are indeed rituals of dating, although these have changed and adapted over time. What was missing from the rigid structure and externally supported argument of this paper was the personal context in which this essay should really be placed. At the time, I was in the early phases of getting to know and starting to date my current boyfriend. My writing could have benefited from including my personal experience with this very process I was describing. Had I been given the liberty to structure an argument using personal experiences as evidence, I would have been able to add a richer level of depth to my argument. My personal experiences with rituals of dating would have provided a valuable “on the ground” perspective and worked to strengthen my claim that there are rituals to dating. 

 

However, I still did not know how to or even if I could write about my personal experiences in a meaningful way to craft an argument. I began to see what a more personal narrative could bring to my writing when I took Writing 220. When we were asked to re-purpose an argument from a previous piece of writing into something new, I scrambled around looking for any substantive piece of writing that I could use and enjoy working with. I still fondly remembered sitting in my first year writing course and looking forward to writing about a personal experience. After scouring the Word documents lined up neatly in my digital class-categorized folders, I ultimately turned to the journal that I keep on a daily basis called “One Line a Day.” Each page of the journal is devoted to a date and has a spot for five years. Multiple days of August 2012 were filled with my writing about a family trip to Yellowstone National Park. That’s what I picked, and I repurposed the journal entry into a travel essay for The New Yorker. The personal nature of the original piece of writing allowed me to carry over elements of this experience into the travel essay. I brought readers into my memories of the park by bringing the scenes that I had written about in my journal to life. This was really my first dive into writing with my own experiences in mind. I realized that writing about things that had happened to me increased my feeling of passion towards writing, and in turn, I produced work of which I was proud. It was more than just churning out an essay to fulfill a syllabus assignment; writing was starting to become a transformative experience thanks to the deep personal connection that I had with what I was writing about.

 

Even though I was writing with a more personal stance, however, I was still following a form of intro-thesis-argument-conclusion…and a conclusion that I had already planned out as I sat down with my fingertips poised over my keyboard. I already knew where I would end up and what argument I was going to make when I started the travel essay piece in my Writing 220 course. This came from years of drafting outlines to papers that followed a prescribed format and hundreds of submitted and reworked theses and conclusions that were supported by works cited documents. I had been programmed to write in such a structured and objective way, that it took several university classes, and some fundamental parts of the Minor in Writing program, to begin to change how I approached the writing process. I was slowly beginning to discover that a rigid structure was not always the best way to incorporate personal experiences into my writing.

 

Blogging as part of the Minor in Writing requirements slowly began to break down this engrained habit of writing in a 5-paragraph-esque style. The instantaneous nature of blogging allows for a very personal and informal experience with the writing process. While I had never been a blogger before joining the minor program, I came to see blogging as a way to think on (virtual) paper – not knowing what I was going to really say until my fingers flashed across my keyboard. The value of this personal, instantaneous type of writing was that it began to push me to break away from the norms of structured writing that I had learned early on in my writing career. My foray into blogging continued to support my quest to write about the personal, but it took semester long courses to really push me to explore personal experiences thoughtfully in my writing.

 

Stepping foot into English 325: The Art of the Essay was a pivotal turning point. The course description drew me to the class, as I was curious about exploring the idea of the personal essay. The course objective, as outlined by the gangly, enthusiastic professor Nicholas Harp, was to recreate true things that have happened to you via writing and reflect introspectively while you go to reveal why these things matter. The very first college writing assignment that I had completed almost three years before in CompLit 122 barely even let me dip my big toes into personal writing. This class now urged me to write to reach an unexpected place with a deeper understanding using my own experiences. Boldly, as I took copious amounts of brainstorming notes in preparation for Essay #2, I chose the prompt to tell my life story in three incidents using some intrinsic feature of myself. I chose my signature. I was forced to reflect on when and how I sign my name and what that revealed about me – a pretty obscure topic compared to what I had written about in the past. I could not depend on library or Internet research to support my question of why signing my name held importance to me. It forced me to use the writing process to lay out all of my ideas and retroactively hone in on the most important points, rather than using the brainstorming process to plan out the key points of my “argument”…because I had only a nebulous idea of what I was going to say. The flexible nature of the assignment allowed me to break away from the typical five paragraph form and instead move from scene to scene with interspersed moments of reflection on what my signature says about me. The result was partially insightful and partially forced – the product of my first attempt at using writing as the method to burrow into a deeper level of understanding of my very personal subject matter.

 

Naturally, there is a time and place for this more reflective type of writing. In the rare moments of writing that I do for my business coursework, writing is often confined to a specific structure that is appropriate in the business world (think memorandum, analytical report, cover letter, etc.) and oriented around facts and analysis… flashback to high school. In my MKT 315: International Marketing class, I wrote a structured piece of writing in a memorandum format; however, I used my personal experiences to influence my work. The task was to explore the impact of culture on marketing by identifying a marketing activity that is similar/different in another country. I used my experience living in Germany for three years to inform my exploration of differences between McDonald’s McCafés in the USA versus Germany. External research was required to back up my claims, yet I was able to call on my personal memories of living immersed in German culture to help give direction on which way to turn for this research support. The process of writing this memorandum gave me insight into areas of this subject that I didn’t know as well, even though I lived in Germany and had visited McCafés. This assignment not only gave me the chance to complete a substantial writing assignment within my major, but also forced me to expand my thinking of how to creatively make use of personal experiences to inform my writing.

 

My writing went through a final pivotal evolution the following semester, my last Fall semester at the University, when I took English 425: Advanced Essay Writing. The course was focused around immersion writing and using one’s current experiences to reflect on the past. Suddenly, I had the chance to not only use past experiences to inform my topic of contemplation, but also reflect on things happening in my current daily life. The first assignment in the course was in the genre of immersion memoir. I used my current experience of being an undergraduate coach for the Novice Women’s Rowing Team to reflect on the four years that I spent competing as a student-athlete on the Varsity Rowing Team. Up until this point, I had been continuously honing my ability to work with personal narratives in my writing, but this essay forced me to dig into deep, sometimes uncomfortable questions about why I rowed and what I both gained and lost by doing so. These were questions that I didn’t know the answers to until I started to write about them. I didn’t anticipate that writing personally would push me into such an uncomfortable zone. However, by writing this essay, I realized that grappling with the abundance of emotions connected to a personal experience serves to enrich my writing, connect with readers on a profounder level, and makes me a more genuine writer. Synthesizing my thoughts on paper without any external sources to rely on but my own experiences propelled me towards a state of deepened understanding about my student-athlete experience, which in turn made my writing more thoughtful and my in-scene writing more vivid.

 

My development as a writer hit a break through moment later on in English 425 when I was able to blend the structured, externally researched style of writing I accustomed to when I entered college and the reflective, personal writing I have come to love. As I sat in the naturally lit space of the Winter Garden in the Ross School of Business one day, watching recruiters and students engage in the awkward recruiting dance, I decided to explore the search for post-graduate employment through the lens of the Ross BBA for the immersion journalism assignment. This genre allowed me to merge investigative research (interviews and articles) and my personal experience with the job recruitment process. In this essay, I deftly navigate between vivid in-scene writing, research, and personal reflection on my own experience. The fact that I had personal experience with Ross recruiting meant that I could disclose insider details to complement the external research I included about the current job market for graduating college students. I finally realized the value of blending an objective and a subjective approach to arrive a place of richer understanding of a topic. I didn’t have to, nor should I, give up one for the other. It was a writing epiphany.     

 

As I write this now, I realize that I have had a transformative writing experience in college. And I did not expect to say that. The college courses I’ve taken have developed my ability to use my personal experiences as valid sources to investigate and make a sustained inquiry. The pre-meditated, structured, and factual writing that I was taught in high school (and even earlier!) is imperative in many situations but, as I’ve discovered, it is not the only way to arrive at a meaningful, impactful conclusion. I’ve developed a passion for writing that comes from exploring an idea connected to a personal experience and arriving at an unexpected place when I place that last period on the page. The undertaking of writing itself, using personal experiences as support, can be an act of self-discovery.