Bridges: From Personal Writing to the Formal Essay. Occasional Paper No. 9.

How writing teachers get students from the personal-experience theme, with its many colloquial terms, to the formal essay seems to be a national issue. Teachers are under pressure to do the thing that colleges seem to value most--to teach the kind of essay that corresponds to term papers or essay questions. Colleges emphasize this because it is part of their testing program, and this pressure passes all the way down to the elementary school. This tends to determine the bent of the writing curriculum. The purpose is to aim at ways of teaching other kinds of writing that will, at the same time, prepare for what colleges want. There are two main bridges from the personal narrative to various kinds of informal and formal essays. One is by way of intervening kinds of discourse that students might practice in between personal writing and essay writing. The other way is by "parlaying" personal writing directly into essay. A good idea is for writing teachers to use former students' writing to work with current students. A selection of student writing from elementary school through college shows a wide repertoire of writing possibilities. (Includes a figure breaking down the main kinds of writing into five groupings. (RAE)