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“No first-person narratives” is a clear statement that personal stories are not appropriate in that classroom. In addition to your specific rhetorical situation, of course, you should always comply with your professors’ guidelines for each assignment. Consider carefully whether personal narrative belongs in papers you are writing for history, biology, or business classes. Given the essays you will read about in this chapter, imagine the larger audiences that the student writers might have been addressing. Often in writing classes it seems that your audience is specifically your professor and secondarily, perhaps, your classmates. In my hypothetical art history essay, the narrative would confuse the reader as to the purpose of the project and distract from the actual message of the paper. Stated simply (perhaps too simply), the rhetorical situation – the writer, the audience, and the purpose of the writing – affects the way the message is presented. Your composition professor will likely talk to you about the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing. However, if I were writing an essay for my art history class about the evolution of weaving techniques and equipment, my story would seem out of place, as I only have experience with one step in that evolution, and that experience is of an observer rather than a participant. My story of working in Rebecca’s shop is useful here – it is intended to attract the attention of the readers and to establish and explain the extended metaphor of weaving. The first consideration is whether using personal narrative is appropriate for your project. However, in this essay, I – yes, “I” – am here to help you step away from those rules and to use personal stories effectively in your academic writing. The opening of this essay has broken all of those so-called rules – it contains a personal story, told in the first person, that at first glance seems unrelated to the topic of writing. Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your academic writing not to include anything that does not directly relate to that mysterious thing called a “thesis statement ” and not to include anything personal in your writing. So what does this have to do with writing? The act of weaving was moving the shuttle with the weft through the warp to create the weave. The weft (formerly known as woof) was placed on bobbins that fed the shuttle. She threaded the warp, the yarn that runs lengthwise, onto the loom. She created her patterns then transferred them into a computer program that told her how to thread the yarn onto the loom to produce the pattern. When one fabric came off the loom, Anne, the seamstress, would begin to cut and sew while Rebecca set up the loom for the next design. Her loom took up half of the back room and she wove while I waited on customers. Rebecca was a weaver who made hand-woven clothing and scarves. We carried many styles of hand-made clothing, jewelry, and accessories, but our most important merchandise was that made by Rebecca herself. I was luckier than many of my classmates: I found a job at a hip little boutique called Rebecca: A Gallery of Wearable Art in the trendy part of town. Like many students, I worked my way through college with a retail job. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself. “Warp and Weft” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research. “Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. 11 Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing
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