Making it personal Writing your experience into academic discussions

Introduction

In this resource we will explore the role of personal voice and personal experience in critical writing. We start by reading a range of examples to understand the varied purposes that inclusion of the personal can bring to discussion. And then it's our turn to try by relating our life experiences to assignment case studies. This activity should give rise to more questions on how to integrate personal experience and voice in ways which enrich analysis and reflection.

Personal writing -its forms and possibilities

In the six examples below, you will find writing which integrates personal experience - sometimes intimate experience - into discussion of a range of topics from loneliness and trauma to reflections on theatre practice.

Read through each extract and be prepared to discuss the following questions:

• What purpose is served by writing about personal experience? For example, does it provide the primary material for critical reflection, or perhaps frame discussion of another's experience, work or argument? Or something else?
• In each extract, how present is the 'voice' of the writer on the page? And is it possible to see a switch in tone from an account of personal experience to a critical analysis of that experience?
• Which examples (if any), would you consider to be unacceptable as 'academic writing'? And why?

Example 1

Two weeks before I took these photographs, in 1973, I left Czechoslovakia for the first time to join my husband A. in Zurich. I had waited several months for the necessary papers but our reunion was painful. My husband stated clearly for the first time that he did not want us to have children. Zurich was so clean and orderly after Prague, my home, I did not want to live there with my husband.

After twelve days in which I did not once pick up my camera, a very close friend, Josef Koudelka, phoned me explaining that he was going to Ireland. He asked me to join him to photograph the annual July pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick mountain in County Mayo. For many years I had been photographing pilgrims in Slovakia. I took the night flight.

I was inexpressibly sad. I could not make sense of my life so I tried to make some sense in my photographs. The summit of the holy mountain was bitterly cold, the rain did not stop. My hands were so wet and cold that I could hardly hold my camera. The bareness of this land was beyond anything I had imagined, but in the faces of these men, in their postures, their prayers, there was something that felt very familiar to me.

Example 2

The first exercise of standing up and sitting down highlights the vital importance of peripheral vision. Peter Brook’s notion that his simple exercise helps us become more sensitive is easily applicable to walking in space because it demonstrates how actors can use their peripheral vision to be aware of everyone and everything that is going on in the room.[1] Our peripheral vision was tested in this exercise as we were instructed to close our eyes and point to a named person in the centre of the room. This part of the exercise allowed me to test myself to see if I was using my peripheral vision. In the several repeated times we did this, I successfully pointed to the correct person in the room, which meant I had fully engaged my peripheral vision.

Later in the extract:

From observing the importance of breathing in the exercise, I have learnt about what McCaw calls ‘the anxiety of learning’.[6] This was seen as we were walking around and our collective pace began to increase, and we began to look down at the floor. This clearly highlights the consequences of not working as an ensemble and not focusing on those around you – it creates a sense of anxiety and therefore increases the speed at which you walk, disengaging my peripheral vision which means that the exercise is harder to complete. This anxiety I felt with the increased pace caused what is known as bunching. Bunching means that we went from filling the space to physically bunching up in one corner, which defeated the purpose of the exercise to fill the space and changed the atmosphere from calm to panicked and rushed.

Walking in space, I believe, is one of the most important exercises in theatre and performance making, because it focuses on all of the key elements of practice: the importance of concentration, peripheral vision, quality of movement and the validity of breathing. The more I practiced the exercise, the more I also learnt about the importance of composure when performing and the willingness to fully engage, so that the exercise demonstrated the previous elements of theatre and performance making.

Example 3

I dread Sundays. They are the days when I feel the loneliest. As I lie in my bed on a Sunday morning, I hear the screams and laughter of family life outside, and I wonder what noises my home would make if it were filled with family. I ask myself why those families want to be together and why I am not with mine. On Sundays, as I wander to the kitchen and pour milk onto a bowl of cereal, I fantasise about home-made muesli and freshly squeezed orange juice; that’s the breakfast I see Jamie Oliver prepare on TV whilst surrounded by his many children. Friends are always encouraging me to make my fantasy breakfast. Often, they are mothers who live in homes like Jamie’s, filled with the noise of family life: people who struggle after a couple of hours of solitude, let alone a whole weekend. However, as my mum says, ‘What’s the point of cooking for one?’

Sundays have a tempo unlike that of any other day of the week. Sunday time moves more slowly. Minutes turn into hours, and hours become tortuous stretches of solitude, almost as if time itself struggled just as much as I do to pull itself along from dawn to dusk. On Sundays, time is my torturer, dangling its existential sword cruelly above my soul. They are the days of the week when the mobile phone pings the least. On Sundays, hardly anyone messages me. I’ll often wait all day for the mobile to show signs of life. On Sundays, the excitement of a numbered red dot appearing on the screen cannot be overestimated. But when the hours go by and no red dots appear, the loneliness I experience can be crippling. On Sundays, time tries to break me, but I hold on to the idea that, one day, Sundays will be full of pleasure rather than pain. When you experience life alone, Sundays are hell.

Sometimes I prostitute myself online: not for sex, but for conversation to fill the emptiness left by the people who I feel have abandoned me. I’ll message a guy on Grindr multiple times who I know isn’t interested in me and provoke him into maintaining a chat. Sometimes I’ll ask questions, too many questions, to keep him chatting for as long as I can. I know who I am, what I have become. As one Twitter post said, ‘Please, God, let me find love before the age of 30, so I’m not a creepy, lonely old man on Grindr’. He isn’t alone; another post reads, ‘my biggest fear in life is not finding a husband and becoming one of those lonely 40-something-year-old men who spend their time harassing twinks on Grindr’. No wonder I find it hard to look in a mirror.

Later in the extract:

A painful making sense of a painful experience

I wish you hadn’t read this about me. Loneliness is yet another thing about which I feel ashamed. And in sharing a somewhat depressing text, I feel embarrassed. But it feels important to tell you what goes on in what Edgar writes about in the introductory chapter: my personal space, my home. A sometimes brutal, non-scripted intersection of identity, place, and space for which narratives both grand and personal have yet to be created.

I’ve seen the faces and read the responses of those who have read the self-dialogue you have just read. I see the pity in their eyes and in their words. And while I appreciate the offers of getting together, a new self-aware part of me does not want to expose myself to the emotionally rich everyday experiences that I crave. Call it self-care. What I seek, something I can articulate more succinctly through writing this chapter, is an ease of companionship that Esther Rantzen (a UK campaigner and widow) exquisitely captured when she said 'loneliness is like having people to do something with, but no one to do nothing with'.8

It’s taken a lot to write this chapter, more than you know. We know loneliness kills, it’s equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So, while no one is holding a cigarette to my mouth, one manufactured by a cultural vacuum hangs from my lips. My gayness is literally killing me. There are no stories about single gay men enjoying Sundays that I can follow. I am adrift without meaning. Without scripts, I move my body less and I eat what I put in the fridge. What, I have agency you say? Why don’t I go out for a Sunday walk and treat myself to a roast dinner, you ask? Because nobody has told me I can. Someone once said I had an underdeveloped sense of entitlement, but I now realise I’ve never known what I am entitled to.

Example 4

In the interview, Doonan discussed an essay in his book [The Asylum] about his experience of being raised by working-class parents in the 1960s and 70s, being ‘stuck in retail’ and of ‘clawing one’s way into the strange, intoxicating world of style and fun’ of New York’s fashion elite. He speaks of his journey into the ‘shimmering world of fun and creative expression’ as one of ‘transformation and reinvention’. In it, Doonan challenges the industry’s culture of giving internships to privileged kids from Knightsbridge and Mayfair in a call to make way for ‘talent’ from ‘the crap towns’, including himself and Croydon-born super model Kate Moss. The chapter ends with a letter to the fashion industry which calls on it to ‘Beware of privileging the privileged. Keep the door open to the self-invented superfreaks from the crap towns’.

In many ways I welcome Doonan’s critique of the mechanisms of social closure that operate in ‘desirable’ industries like like fashion via internships and nepotism, particularly given my work in this area. There is also much in Doonan’s story about his sexual identity, isolation and encounters with homophobia that is touching. Yet I found much of Doonan’s interview troubling, specifically the broader cultural and political currency and significance of these tales of escape from the working-class ‘crap town’.

Indeed, Doonan presents a familiar tale of desire, class transformation, aspiration and ambition; of mobility from working-class locales and into seemingly ‘shiny spaces’ preserved for the privileged. We find such tales frequently in literature, music and film. These tales also ring a chord with me, being raised by parents with the instruction to ‘escape’ Crawley: a ‘new town’, literally created to appeal to London’s working-class, including my grandparents, in post-war Britain as alluring, ‘aspirational’ and full of promise. In many ways it delivered. Yet, since the 1980s onwards has frequently been derided as one of England’s ’crappest towns’ (a ‘shithole’ that’s full of ‘chavs’ no less).

What troubles me is how Doonan’s tales of ‘escape’ are recourse to linguistic repertoire which problematically fixes working class locales, and consequently ‘ways of being’, in deficit terms. He describes Reading as ‘grim’, ‘hopeless’, ‘slaggy and violent’, as the ‘naff side of the tracks’. In stark contrast, the world of fashion is alluring and desirable with its ‘shining light’. Doonan doesn’t entirely reject his home: he explains how he and his ‘crap town contemporaries’ like Kate Moss, ‘celebrate our gritty roots with pride while simultaneously rejoicing in the fact that we escaped’. Yet, arguably, Doonan and Moss can claim this position safely, celebrate being ‘a working-class slag from a crap town’, because they have ‘escaped’; because their mobility into the elite means that they can mobilise their ‘working-class roots’ as a form of capital that gives them kudos and ‘edge’, whilst simultaneously allowing them to denigrate and disidentify from it.

This tale of escape which positions the working-class as deficit appears to have growing currency among our political elites. As we’ve discussed in a now exhausting number of times on this website, the political speeches of David Cameron, Michael Gove and David Laws are informed by a positioning of working-class schools, places, ways of being as in need of transcendence; where being ‘aspirational’ is defined as getting out and getting away from the working-class and all that it represents; where equality can be achieved if only those pesky working-class kids and their parents would apply to Oxbridge or consider a career in banking.

Example 5

The “accident of private history” that forced me to think about the “personal” as philosophical was a near-fatal sexual assault and attempted murder. Unlike Descartes, who had “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations” in order to find any knowledge “that was stable and likely to last,” I had my world demolished for me.3 The fact that I could be walking down a quiet, sunlit country road at one moment and be battling a murderous attacker the next undermined my most fundamental assumptions about the world. After my hospitalization, I took a year-long disability leave from teaching and found myself, like Descartes, “quite alone,” with “a clear stretch of free time” in which to rebuild my shattered system of beliefs.4

As I carried out this process of cognitive, as well as physical and emotional, recovery, I was dismayed to find very little of use to me that was written by philosophers. It occurred to me that the fact that rape was not considered a properly philosophical subject, while war, for example, was, resulted not only from the paucity of women in the profession but also from the disciplinary bias against thinking about the ‘personal,’ against writing in the form of narrative.(Of course, the avowedly personal experiences of men have been neglected in philosophical analysis as well. The study of the ethics of war, for example, has dealt with questions of strategy and justice, as viewed from the outside, and not with the wartime experiences of soldiers or with the aftermath of their trauma.)5

In philosophy, first-person narratives, especially ones written by those with perspectives previously excluded from the discipline, are necessary for several reasons. I’ll discuss just three. Such narratives are necessary: (1) to expose previously hidden biases in the discipline’s subject matter and methodology; (2) to facilitate understanding of (or empathy with) those different from ourselves; and (3) to lay on the table our own biases as scholars.

First-person narratives can expose the gender and other biases inherent in, among other things, much traditional moral, legal, and political philosophy. They can serve to bear witness, bringing professional attention to the injustices suffered by previously neglected or discounted groups. Such narratives can also provide the basis for empathy with those who are different from ourselves, which, as recently argued by feminist moral theorists such as Diana Meyers, is crucial for an adequately inclusive understanding of certain moral, legal, and political issues.6

In other fields, as well, first-person accounts can facilitate the understanding of cultural attitudes and practices different from our own, as Renato Rosaldo has argued (and shown) in “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.”7 In this chapter, Rosaldo, an anthropologist who had previously published a book on headhunting among the Ilongot (in the Philippines), describes how the experience of rage after the death of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo, gave him new insight into the rage Ilongot older men felt in bereavement. Before his own encounter with grief, Rosaldo writes, he “brushed aside” Ilongot accounts of “the rage in bereavement that could impel men to headhunt.” He says he probably “naively equated grief with sadness.” Only after “being repositioned” by his own “devastating loss” could he begin to grasp that “Ilongot older men mean precisely what they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads.”8 This is not to say that he fully comprehended (or condoned) the past headhunting behavior of the Ilongots, but it became less foreign to him. His first-person narrative, likewise, makes the practice less foreign to us, his readers. As he explains, his “use of personal experience serves as a vehicle for making the quality and intensity of the rage in Ilongot grief more readily accessible to readers than certain more detached modes of com-position.”9

At other times, first-person narratives are used simply to put on the table one’s perspectives and possible biases, which of course implies the acknowledgment that such things inevitably work their way into our research, no matter how scrupulously “objective” we try to be. Susan Estrich begins her book, Real Rape, with an account of the rape she survived in 1974. To justify this radical and courageous introduction to a long-neglected legal subject, Estrich argues that if the rape wasn’t her fault, if she’s not ashamed, why shouldn’t she mention it? “And so I mention it. I mention it in my classes. I describe it here. I do so in the interest of full disclosure. I like to think that I am an informed and intelligent student of rape. But I am not unbiased. I am no objective observer, if such a thing exists (which I doubt; I think the major difference between me and those who have written ‘objectively’ about the law of rape is that I admit my involvement and bias). In writing about rape, I am writing about my own life” (pp. 1–3).

Example 6

My journey into why I chose to adapt Mr. Wroe’s Virgins now, commenced on November 7, 2016; the day Donald Trump won the Presidency of the United States. In the guise of ‘Make America Great Again’, President Trump gave supporters free rein to spout, what I believe to be, ignorant, sexist, homophobic, and racist words of hate. What had been spoken behind closed doors now appeared spray painted on mosque and synagogue walls, printed on bumper stickers, and shouted at innocent bystanders.

I was aware my father voted for Donald Trump, and my mother adhered even if she might not acquiesce. I excused this based on age and apprehension, yet never expected to hear them exclaim such propaganda as ‘Trump allows us to say Merry Christmas again’, and ‘Trump says what everyone is thinking’. I questioned how two intelligent people could irrationally support Donald Trump. Where I saw a charlatan, they saw a savior. What was it about him that made them hold him in such high regard? Even when confronted with facts, they would blindly defend him. I ceased talking politics with my father when I could see a wedge beginning to form between us. What once was humour and healthy debate, appeared now to be a stony argument.

How does one connect the election of Donald Trump to a novel about a Christian Israelite prophet, John Wroe? Observing history, I perceived a lineage of charismatic leaders with devotee following them, often to their detriment. I craved to understand the cause of blind belief and why what seems logical and reasonable, in these cases, did not prevail.

Working with Katie Mitchell I was inspired to employ her pre-production preparatory method to adapt a novel for the stage. Mitchell advises a director to prepare by “extracting information from the text that will help the actors to perform the characters and situations in the play” (Mitchell 16). Having prior experience adapting novels for the stage, I speculated if a playwright could use Mitchell’s preparatory method to develop an enhanced understanding of the source text. With this query, I began searching for the right text to adapt using Mitchell’s analytical method, and my intellectual curiosity on the topic of blind belief led me to base my research on Jane Rogers’ novel, Mr. Wroe’s Virgins. I was inspired to create a work based on my own experience.

And an extract from another piece of writing by the same group of authors:

… Nevertheless, the complex narrative and themes explored within Our Class* led me to question my positionality with the text and whether it was ethically acceptable to direct this show. According to Linda Alcoff, positionality is the 'knower's specific position within any given context, a position always defined by gender, race, class, and other socially significant dimensions'. (433). In relation to the themes explored in Our Class, I was required to evaluate my position towards directing a text depicting Jewish and Polish culture and history, when I myself am not Jewish or Polish, in order to ensure any directorial decisions that I make are not deemed as cultural appropriation. Despite this, I do have a valid claim to the material as my family originates from Silesia; a long-fought over region that lies within Poland, along with being the location where Kantor's father and aunt once lived. (Plesniarowicz, 12). My family were present in the area during World War II and as a result, my ancestry and by extension cultural identity, belongs to the same shared cultural history that is depicted within Our Class, thus in my personal view, validating my positionality in relation to the text.

* Our Class is a drama that explores the pogrom against Polish Jews in 1941

Writing activity

When choosing case studies for your assignment, have you been drawn to any specific aspects that 'strike a chord' i.e. make a personal connection with your own life experiences? What could you say about these connections and how would you say it? You might want to do one or more of these things in your essay:

Frame your interest by referring to a life experience that shares a similarity or, indeed, a difference to the experience(s) explored in the case study.

Find a connection between the case study and your own life experience and use this as a way to deepen critical reflection on the theme.

Discuss your own personal context in order to clarify your position - and potential biases - in relation to the chosen case studies

Bearing the above in mind, develop a short paragraph that relates the case study to your own life experience. Tap this out in rough on your laptop and discuss with a partner.

How well does this writing help you frame your case study discussion and enrich your analysis?

A reminder about self-reflective writing

Reflective writing differs from ‘conventional’ essay writing in one important respect. In reflective writing, your own experience and responses are a source of evidence. In a sense, you are the object of enquiry. It is therefore perfectly appropriate to use first person 'I' when discussing your experience and responses.

In other respects, a reflective essay is just like a conventional academic essay.

• It plugs discussion into key literature and follows academic conventions for in-text referencing and bibliographies.
• It uses formal academic English, avoiding casual vocabulary ( a lot of, sort of, terrific) and contractions (can’t , won’t), and prizes economy of expression.
• Errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling are not tolerated.
• It makes use of description sparingly and foregrounds analysis and argument supported by clear essay structure and focussed paragraphs.

References

Example 1

Luskacova, Marketa. “Pilgrims in Ireland.” Granta: Birthday Special, vol. 28, 1989, pp. 201–210

Example 2

First year reflection on a drama exercise and reading. RHUL CeDAS study materials: essay exemplar, 2022

Example 3

Thomas, Cinead. “Sunday: An intimate self-dialogue about loneliness.” The Everyday Lives of Gay Men: Autoethnographies of the Ordinary, edited by Edgar Rodríguez-Dorans and Jason Holmes, Taylor & Francis, 2022, pp. 50–57.

Example 4

Celebyouth (no date). "Crap Town Slags’, Gove and ‘Educating Rita’: Some (More) Thoughts On Aspiration And ‘Class Mobility’". Available at: http://www.celebyouth.org/crap-town-slags-gove-and-educating-rita-some-more-thoughts-on-aspiration-and-class-mobility/. 4 December 2022.

Example 5

Brison, Susan J. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton University Press, 2002

Example 6

MA Theatre Directing Dissertation, RHUL CeDAS study materials: exemplar, 2018

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