Source #2

This article, Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing, dealt with many of the issues I have with personal writing in the classroom. Gere talks about getting personal narratives that are far too painful to read, often about death, abuse, and rape. She says that sometimes they are"too painful to read". She ends with saying that this a part of the student and this other part must come out for the student to move on in their writing careers.

Gere does realize one particular downfall of using personal writing in the classroom and it involves the idea of colonization. She takes a quote from bell hooks to explain, "No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear you voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in such a way that has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew" (216).

This is a particularly fascinating idea mostly because I've never came across it before. But it's true, we take someone else's story and re-tell it in a way that keeps us involved as the author. I thought this was a particularly good part of the article.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing" College Composition and Communication. 53 (2001): 203-223. Jstor. MSU Library, Springfield, MO. 12 March 2009.