If your composition professor has asked you to read this chapter, it’s apretty safe bet that you may use personal experiences in your writing forthat class. Even in that setting, however, there are times when it is more ef-fective than others. Using the examples of the essays I’ve quoted from andthe guidelines given in the beginning of this chapter, here are some tips onwhen to use your personal experience in your essays:• When, like Callie and Melynda, your experiences have inspired apassionate opinion on your topic• When, like Ethelin, your personal experiences constantly pointback to your central idea• When, like me, your personal experiences provide a strong and ex-tended metaphor for your subject• When, like all of the writers, your personal experience provides astructure or framework for your essay

The examples from my students’ essays can help you understand how touse personal experience in your academic writing

When the weaver turnsthe shuttle at the edge of the warp, the weft creates a finished edge thatprevents the fabric from fraying or unraveling called a selvage. The turnsin Ethelin’s story create a sense that her life, which is sometimes unplannedand chaotic, still has something that keeps it from unraveling, and thatsomething is her artistic nature

“We write to think – to be surprised by what appears on thepage; to explore our world with language; to discover meaning that teachesus and may be worth sharing with others .... . . we write to know what wewant to say.”

It wasn’t until I did that exercise with the markers that I realized howsmoothly Callie had incorporated the three elements of her writing. As I’vedone in this essay, Callie framed her story with the personal.

The humanmind is a giant filing cabinet of stories, and when you hear one, you go tothe appropriate file drawer – in this case R for Retail Employment – andpull out your own

I will use examples fromthree of my students in a first-year course, a course designed to help writersbridge the gap between high school and college writing.

Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your aca-demic writing; not to include anything that does not directly relate to thatmysterious thing called a “thesis statement;” and not to include anythingpersonal in your writing.

Rebecc

it addressesthe question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively,focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience isappropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narra-tive pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personalexperience can translate into the ability to incorporate research

“Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way ofusing personal and narrative writing within academic essays.

Some mbira players have cultivatednew performance styles, applying them within the forms of tradi-tional mbira compositions; others have adopted a new mbira tuningknown as magandanga,

bira music has continued to flourish in Zimbabwe.

egin, the music globalization commonplaces that are most broadly circu-lating in Western intellectual discourse as actualities or immediate predic-tions at the end of the twentieth century

volumes of which were published between 1879 and 1889), so his son, John Spencer&XUZHQZLWQHVVHGWKHH[FOXVLRQRIWKH&XUZHQ¶VZRUNIURPWKHVWRU\RI(QJODQG¶Vmusical progress

As early as 1870, Victorian Renaissance man and music scholar George Grove wrotea draft for what would become the story we know as the English Musical Renaissance:the familiar tale of England’s musical revival during the late Victorian period.

historiography

quoted in Curwen 1895, 112