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Essay and Personal Writing

404
Anderson, Chris, ed. Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticisms, Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1989.

New Journalism and personal essays by contemporary men and women of letters are often studied in composition classes. This intersection of literature and rhetoric is explored in the seventeen essays in this volume, presenting readings of individual authors, theoretical commentary on the essay form, and pedagogical strategies. Essays include Charles Schuster, "The Nonfictional Prose of Richard Selzer"; Suzanne Clark, "Annie Dillard"; Carl H. Klaus, "Essayists on the Essay"; George L. Dillon, "Fiction in Persuasion: Personal Experience as Evidence and Art"; Peter Elbow, "Gretel Ehrlich and Richard Selzer"; John Clifford, "Responding to Loren Eiseley's 'The Running Man'"; and Pat Hoy II, "Students and Teachers under the Influence: Image and Idea in the Essay."

See: Akua Duku Anokye, "Oral Connections to Literacy" [440].

405
Bloom, Lynn Z. "The Essay Canon." College English 61 (March 1999): 401–30.

The essay is now read primarily in composition anthologies, whose contents thus reveal the essay canon of the time. In anthologies, an "essay" may be virtually any nonfiction prose piece, such as the Gettysburg Address. Short or abridged pieces are favored. They must also be teachable (not too difficult for first-year students, for example), provocative (according to writing teachers' proclivities), and suitable as models of form and style for undergraduate writing. Permissions costs must also be affordable. Bloom surveyed fifty-eight best-selling anthologies in multiple editions from World War II to the present, to compile the list printed here of most-anthologized authors and essays (in first place is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"). Bloom deplores the dull study questions that usually accompany essays in anthologies and the neglect of the genre by MLA and CCCC. More serious pedagogical and scholarly attention to the genre might result in a less conservative canon.

406
Coles, William E., Jr. The Plural I: The Teaching of Writing. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1988.

Students produce "themewriting"—correct but meaningless prose—when teachers correct only for mechanics and style and never comment on content. Coles sets forth a thirty-lesson writing course that focuses on content by identifying an intellectual problem that the class will work on together throughout the semester. Assignments pose increasingly difficult questions about the common problem. Class discussion of students' essays creates a productive self-consciousness about using language.

407
Connors, Robert J. "Personal Writing Assignments." CCC 38 (May 1987): 166–83.

Through most of its history, instruction in rhetoric aimed to equip students to write or speak on any objective topic. The rhetor was to be knowledgeable and impersonal in treating subjects. In the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries, personal tastes and feelings became more acceptable, particularly in essays and narratives. Nineteenth-century romanticism brought a dramatic shift in the direction of personal writing, and rhetoric instruction, following suit, came to emphasize everyday language (as opposed to Ciceronian high style), assignments that called upon personal experience (rather than abstract ideas), and invention methods for probing personal experience (rather than for searching academic knowledge). By the early twentieth century, novelty—one's own new experience—became a criterion for good writing. Several objective modes remained—impersonal or public topics were still assigned for exposition and argument exercises—but personal assignments remained an important, if contested, element of the composition curriculum.

See: Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers [397].

408
Elbow, Peter, ed. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1994.

Seventeen essays, beginning with an analytical introduction by Elbow and including Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art"; Walker Gibson, "The 'Speaking Voice' and the Teaching of Composition"; Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Introduction to Dissemination"; bell hooks, "When I Was a Young Soldier for the Revolution: Coming to Voice"; June Jordan, "Nobody Mean to Me Than You: And the Future Life of Willie Jordan"; I. Hashimoto, "Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition"; Lester Faigley, "Judging Writing, Judging Selves"; Toby Fulwiler, "Looking and Listening for My Voice"; and Randall Freisinger, "Voicing the Self: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance in a Postmodern Age."

409
Harris, Jeanette. Expressive Discourse. Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1990.

All discourse can be described as expressive of the writer's ideas and feelings, and virtually no discourse is entirely expressive—that is, devoid of a desire to communicate. Thus, although the category "expressive discourse" is in a sense false, the concept has aided the development of composition pedagogy. Four types of expressive discourse have been promoted. (1) The interior text is the unwritten text in a writer's mind. It serves as the model of the text to be created and may drive the desire to see the text realized. (2) Generative texts include reading journals, summaries, position papers, personal reaction papers, and so on, which help prepare students for more formal writing. (3) Aesthetic discourse forms—poems, stories, and plays—are often taught on the questionable assumption that practicing these forms improves writing generally. (4) Experience-based discourse, or the essay on personal experience, is the type most often assigned in composition classes. There is no evidence that it helps students improve their writing. Moreover, such assignments tend to dichotomize personal writing and information-based writing when a preferable approach is to help students integrate the two.

410
Hollis, Karyn. "Liberating Voices: Autobiographical Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938." CCC 45 (February 1994): 31–60.

The Bryn Mawr Summer School boasted a distinguished faculty, an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum, and an equally innovative pedagogy that included peer collaboration, guided revision, student publication, and links between personal experience and academic disciplines. Writing an autobiography was a key assignment. Today, some critics charge that the autobiographical sensibility is compromised by the masculine belief in a unified self. The Summer School assignments, however, show awareness of the need to be critical of the status quo and not present the themes of bourgeois life as norms. The most popular topic in the autobiographies is work. Most of the autobiographies show a shift from a narrative "I," typical of the unitary bourgeois consciousness, to "we," along with a shift from past to present tense, the "I" being critical and the "we" offering responses to exploitation. This identification with other workers, or with women, or with the family, is the voice of public resistance and empowerment, counteracting the powerless social atom represented by the "I" narrator. Follow-up studies show that many of the students went back to their communities to become civic, church, and union leaders. The "we" of collective subjectivity is rarely seen in student autobiography, but the sense of collective endeavor that supports it might well be encouraged as a way to change consciousness.

411
Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1970.

College students are urged to write dull, impersonal prose: "Engfish." They will write better and learn more if they see writing as a way of telling the truth about their experiences. This textbook contains lessons on telling facts, working through facts to large meanings, using a journal, sharpening word choice, and writing critically. See also Uptaught (Rochelle Park: Hayden, 1970), in which Macrorie describes how his dissatisfaction with his own teaching and school standards led him to develop the "telling writing" pedagogy.

See: Richard E. Miller, "Fault Lines in the Contact Zone" [198].

See: James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse [381].

412
Morgan, Dan. "Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing." College English 60 (March 1998): 318–25.

Teachers who assign personal writing are often distressed by students' apparent disclosure of criminal behavior or severe emotional problems. Administrators should provide clear guidelines for when and how such self-disclosure should be reported; but teachers should realize that counseling services at many schools are inadequate. Sometimes, teachers just need to listen sympathetically while maintaining appropriate professional distance. Morgan also suggests that teachers emphasize audience and purpose in writing assignments, using sample papers from earlier classes to show what kinds of problems arise when explosively self-disclosing pieces are offered for class discussion. Teachers may also rule some topics out of bounds—illegal activities, for example—and may deal with self-disclosing drafts in conference. Teachers should seek readings (not commonly found in composition anthologies) that deal with the kinds of personal topics students usually choose, such as divorce or alcoholism, in appropriate ways. Morgan sensibly acknowledges the limitations of all these suggestions, but deplores the solution that abandons all personal writing assignments.

413
Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, eds. ALT Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

Debate continues over the fundamental assumption that all students need to learn traditional academic discourse while many academics and students develop "hybrid," "mixed," "alternative," or "constructed" forms of academic discourse. Fifteen essays include the following: Patricia Bizzell, "The Intellectual Work of 'Mixed' Forms of Academic Discourses"; Malea Powell, "Listening to ghosts: An alternative (non)argument"; Jacqueline Jones Royster, "Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea"; Sidney I. Dobrin, "A Problem with Writing (about) 'Alternative' Discourse"; Haixia Lan, "Contrastive Rhetoric: A Must in Cross-Cultural Inquiries"; Christopher Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki, "Questioning Alternative Discourses: Reports from Across the Disciplines"; LuMing Mao, "Re-Clustering Traditional Academic Discourse: Alternating with Confucian Discourse"; Laura Lai Long, "Full (dis)Course Meal: Some Words on Hybrid/Alternative Discourses"; Michael Spooner, "An Essay We're Learning to Read: Responding to Alt.Style."

414
Spellmeyer, Kurt. "A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy." CE 51 (March 1989): 262–76.

Proponents of teaching academic discourse depict learning to write as constructing one's knowledge and one's very self through a discourse given by tradition. This approach ignores something universal in all uses of discourse, namely the individual writer's attempts to work out interpretations of experience that make sense to him or her, that allow him or her to retain or reconstruct a feeling of personal coherence. Unity within the writer and within the discourse is best achieved through a form that owes as little as possible to tradition, that contravenes convention for the sake of reproducing the personal viewpoint, yet recognizes stylistic constraints imposed by the attempt to make the personal viewpoint public. The essay best meets this need. Students should be encouraged to write essays in order to learn to put their own stamps on any discourse they employ.

415
Tobin, Lad. "Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males." College English 58 (February 1996): 158–75.

Many male students write personal essays that celebrate acts of machismo in clichŽd language. Both male and female teachers tend to overreact negatively to such essays. To better understand both these students' writing and their personal development, teachers should study how masculine identities are constructed in American culture—considering, for example, the significance of the automobile. They should be especially careful not to impose their own cultural agendas when coaching revision. They should force themselves to respond empathetically even to the most openly defiant or disengaged students. Tobin illustrates the success of these approaches through a semester's experience with one male student's writing.

416
Trimmer, Joseph F., ed. Narration as Knowledge: Tales of the Teaching Life. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Deliberately avoiding academic methods of empirical or ethnographic reporting, the nineteen teachers included here tell stories about their teaching experiences in ways that attempt to make full use of the literary resources of the essay genre. Among the essays, which both exemplify and discuss personal writing, are Victor Villanueva, Jr., "Shoot-Out at the I'm OK, You're OK Corral"; Lad Tobin, "Reading and Writing about Death, Disease, and Dysfunction; or, How I've Spent My Summer Vacations"; Lynn Z. Bloom, "Subverting the Academic Master Plot"; Cecelia Tichi, "The Teflon Lesson and Why It Didn't Stick"; Sondra Perl, "Facing the Other: The Emergence of Ethics and Selfhood in a Cross-Cultural Writing Classroom"; and Wendy Bishop, "What We Don't Like, Don't Admit, Don't Understand Can't Hurt Us, Or Can It? On Writing, Teaching, Living."

417
Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. Voices on Voice. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1994.

Voice as a metaphor for style signals a focus on the writer as an individual, on the drive to express oneself, and on the search for personal authenticity, for a distinctive or a natural sound, and for control of various personae that may inhabit a text or speak to a particular discourse community or speak within a particular culture. Eighteen essays explore the range of meanings and pedagogical uses of the idea of voice, including Peter Elbow, "What Do We Mean When We Talk about Voice in Texts?"; Doug Minnerly, "Affect and Effect in Voice"; Nancy Allen and Deborah Bosley, "Technical Texts/Personal Voice: Intersections and Crossed Purposes"; Carl Klaus, "The Chameleon 'I': On Voice and Personality"; Margaret Woodworth, "Teaching Voice"; John Albertini, Bonnie Meath-Lang, and David Harris, "Voice as Muse, Message, and Medium: The Views of Deaf College Students"; Tom Carr, "Varieties of the 'Other': Voice and Native American Culture"; John Powers and Gwendolyn Gong, "East Asian Voice and the Expression of Cultural Ethos"; Susan Brown Carlton, "Voice and the Naming of Woman"; Randall Freisinger, "Voicing the Self: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance in a Postmodern Age"; and Peter Elbow and Kathleen Blake Yancey, "An Annotated and Collective Bibliography of Voice."

404	Anderson, Chris, ed. Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticisms, Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1989. New Journalism and personal essays by contemporary men and women of letters are often studied in composition classes. This intersection of literature and rhetoric is explored in the seventeen essays in this volume, presenting readings of individual authors, theoretical commentary on the essay form, and pedagogical strategies. Essays include Charles Schuster, "The Nonfictional Prose of Richard Selzer"; Suzanne Clark, "Annie Dillard"; Carl H. Klaus, "Essayists on the Essay"; George L. Dillon, "Fiction in Persuasion: Personal Experience as Evidence and Art"; Peter Elbow, "Gretel Ehrlich and Richard Selzer"; John Clifford, "Responding to Loren Eiseley's 'The Running Man'"; and Pat Hoy II, "Students and Teachers under the Influence: Image and Idea in the Essay." See: Akua Duku Anokye, "Oral Connections to Literacy" [440].
405	Bloom, Lynn Z. "The Essay Canon." College English 61 (March 1999): 401–30. The essay is now read primarily in composition anthologies, whose contents thus reveal the essay canon of the time. In anthologies, an "essay" may be virtually any nonfiction prose piece, such as the Gettysburg Address. Short or abridged pieces are favored. They must also be teachable (not too difficult for first-year students, for example), provocative (according to writing teachers' proclivities), and suitable as models of form and style for undergraduate writing. Permissions costs must also be affordable. Bloom surveyed fifty-eight best-selling anthologies in multiple editions from World War II to the present, to compile the list printed here of most-anthologized authors and essays (in first place is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"). Bloom deplores the dull study questions that usually accompany essays in anthologies and the neglect of the genre by MLA and CCCC. More serious pedagogical and scholarly attention to the genre might result in a less conservative canon.
406	Coles, William E., Jr. The Plural I: The Teaching of Writing. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1988. Students produce "themewriting"—correct but meaningless prose—when teachers correct only for mechanics and style and never comment on content. Coles sets forth a thirty-lesson writing course that focuses on content by identifying an intellectual problem that the class will work on together throughout the semester. Assignments pose increasingly difficult questions about the common problem. Class discussion of students' essays creates a productive self-consciousness about using language.
407	Connors, Robert J. "Personal Writing Assignments." CCC 38 (May 1987): 166–83. Through most of its history, instruction in rhetoric aimed to equip students to write or speak on any objective topic. The rhetor was to be knowledgeable and impersonal in treating subjects. In the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries, personal tastes and feelings became more acceptable, particularly in essays and narratives. Nineteenth-century romanticism brought a dramatic shift in the direction of personal writing, and rhetoric instruction, following suit, came to emphasize everyday language (as opposed to Ciceronian high style), assignments that called upon personal experience (rather than abstract ideas), and invention methods for probing personal experience (rather than for searching academic knowledge). By the early twentieth century, novelty—one's own new experience—became a criterion for good writing. Several objective modes remained—impersonal or public topics were still assigned for exposition and argument exercises—but personal assignments remained an important, if contested, element of the composition curriculum. See: Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers [397].
408	Elbow, Peter, ed. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1994. Seventeen essays, beginning with an analytical introduction by Elbow and including Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art"; Walker Gibson, "The 'Speaking Voice' and the Teaching of Composition"; Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Introduction to Dissemination"; bell hooks, "When I Was a Young Soldier for the Revolution: Coming to Voice"; June Jordan, "Nobody Mean to Me Than You: And the Future Life of Willie Jordan"; I. Hashimoto, "Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition"; Lester Faigley, "Judging Writing, Judging Selves"; Toby Fulwiler, "Looking and Listening for My Voice"; and Randall Freisinger, "Voicing the Self: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance in a Postmodern Age."
409	Harris, Jeanette. Expressive Discourse. Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1990. All discourse can be described as expressive of the writer's ideas and feelings, and virtually no discourse is entirely expressive—that is, devoid of a desire to communicate. Thus, although the category "expressive discourse" is in a sense false, the concept has aided the development of composition pedagogy. Four types of expressive discourse have been promoted. (1) The interior text is the unwritten text in a writer's mind. It serves as the model of the text to be created and may drive the desire to see the text realized. (2) Generative texts include reading journals, summaries, position papers, personal reaction papers, and so on, which help prepare students for more formal writing. (3) Aesthetic discourse forms—poems, stories, and plays—are often taught on the questionable assumption that practicing these forms improves writing generally. (4) Experience-based discourse, or the essay on personal experience, is the type most often assigned in composition classes. There is no evidence that it helps students improve their writing. Moreover, such assignments tend to dichotomize personal writing and information-based writing when a preferable approach is to help students integrate the two.
410	Hollis, Karyn. "Liberating Voices: Autobiographical Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938." CCC 45 (February 1994): 31–60. The Bryn Mawr Summer School boasted a distinguished faculty, an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum, and an equally innovative pedagogy that included peer collaboration, guided revision, student publication, and links between personal experience and academic disciplines. Writing an autobiography was a key assignment. Today, some critics charge that the autobiographical sensibility is compromised by the masculine belief in a unified self. The Summer School assignments, however, show awareness of the need to be critical of the status quo and not present the themes of bourgeois life as norms. The most popular topic in the autobiographies is work. Most of the autobiographies show a shift from a narrative "I," typical of the unitary bourgeois consciousness, to "we," along with a shift from past to present tense, the "I" being critical and the "we" offering responses to exploitation. This identification with other workers, or with women, or with the family, is the voice of public resistance and empowerment, counteracting the powerless social atom represented by the "I" narrator. Follow-up studies show that many of the students went back to their communities to become civic, church, and union leaders. The "we" of collective subjectivity is rarely seen in student autobiography, but the sense of collective endeavor that supports it might well be encouraged as a way to change consciousness.
411	Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1970. College students are urged to write dull, impersonal prose: "Engfish." They will write better and learn more if they see writing as a way of telling the truth about their experiences. This textbook contains lessons on telling facts, working through facts to large meanings, using a journal, sharpening word choice, and writing critically. See also Uptaught (Rochelle Park: Hayden, 1970), in which Macrorie describes how his dissatisfaction with his own teaching and school standards led him to develop the "telling writing" pedagogy. See: Richard E. Miller, "Fault Lines in the Contact Zone" [198]. See: James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse [381].
412	Morgan, Dan. "Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing." College English 60 (March 1998): 318–25. Teachers who assign personal writing are often distressed by students' apparent disclosure of criminal behavior or severe emotional problems. Administrators should provide clear guidelines for when and how such self-disclosure should be reported; but teachers should realize that counseling services at many schools are inadequate. Sometimes, teachers just need to listen sympathetically while maintaining appropriate professional distance. Morgan also suggests that teachers emphasize audience and purpose in writing assignments, using sample papers from earlier classes to show what kinds of problems arise when explosively self-disclosing pieces are offered for class discussion. Teachers may also rule some topics out of bounds—illegal activities, for example—and may deal with self-disclosing drafts in conference. Teachers should seek readings (not commonly found in composition anthologies) that deal with the kinds of personal topics students usually choose, such as divorce or alcoholism, in appropriate ways. Morgan sensibly acknowledges the limitations of all these suggestions, but deplores the solution that abandons all personal writing assignments.
413	Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, eds. ALT Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 2002. Debate continues over the fundamental assumption that all students need to learn traditional academic discourse while many academics and students develop "hybrid," "mixed," "alternative," or "constructed" forms of academic discourse. Fifteen essays include the following: Patricia Bizzell, "The Intellectual Work of 'Mixed' Forms of Academic Discourses"; Malea Powell, "Listening to ghosts: An alternative (non)argument"; Jacqueline Jones Royster, "Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea"; Sidney I. Dobrin, "A Problem with Writing (about) 'Alternative' Discourse"; Haixia Lan, "Contrastive Rhetoric: A Must in Cross-Cultural Inquiries"; Christopher Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki, "Questioning Alternative Discourses: Reports from Across the Disciplines"; LuMing Mao, "Re-Clustering Traditional Academic Discourse: Alternating with Confucian Discourse"; Laura Lai Long, "Full (dis)Course Meal: Some Words on Hybrid/Alternative Discourses"; Michael Spooner, "An Essay We're Learning to Read: Responding to Alt.Style."
414	Spellmeyer, Kurt. "A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy." CE 51 (March 1989): 262–76. Proponents of teaching academic discourse depict learning to write as constructing one's knowledge and one's very self through a discourse given by tradition. This approach ignores something universal in all uses of discourse, namely the individual writer's attempts to work out interpretations of experience that make sense to him or her, that allow him or her to retain or reconstruct a feeling of personal coherence. Unity within the writer and within the discourse is best achieved through a form that owes as little as possible to tradition, that contravenes convention for the sake of reproducing the personal viewpoint, yet recognizes stylistic constraints imposed by the attempt to make the personal viewpoint public. The essay best meets this need. Students should be encouraged to write essays in order to learn to put their own stamps on any discourse they employ.
415	Tobin, Lad. "Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males." College English 58 (February 1996): 158–75. Many male students write personal essays that celebrate acts of machismo in clichŽd language. Both male and female teachers tend to overreact negatively to such essays. To better understand both these students' writing and their personal development, teachers should study how masculine identities are constructed in American culture—considering, for example, the significance of the automobile. They should be especially careful not to impose their own cultural agendas when coaching revision. They should force themselves to respond empathetically even to the most openly defiant or disengaged students. Tobin illustrates the success of these approaches through a semester's experience with one male student's writing.
416	Trimmer, Joseph F., ed. Narration as Knowledge: Tales of the Teaching Life. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1997. Deliberately avoiding academic methods of empirical or ethnographic reporting, the nineteen teachers included here tell stories about their teaching experiences in ways that attempt to make full use of the literary resources of the essay genre. Among the essays, which both exemplify and discuss personal writing, are Victor Villanueva, Jr., "Shoot-Out at the I'm OK, You're OK Corral"; Lad Tobin, "Reading and Writing about Death, Disease, and Dysfunction; or, How I've Spent My Summer Vacations"; Lynn Z. Bloom, "Subverting the Academic Master Plot"; Cecelia Tichi, "The Teflon Lesson and Why It Didn't Stick"; Sondra Perl, "Facing the Other: The Emergence of Ethics and Selfhood in a Cross-Cultural Writing Classroom"; and Wendy Bishop, "What We Don't Like, Don't Admit, Don't Understand Can't Hurt Us, Or Can It? On Writing, Teaching, Living."
417	Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. Voices on Voice. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1994. Voice as a metaphor for style signals a focus on the writer as an individual, on the drive to express oneself, and on the search for personal authenticity, for a distinctive or a natural sound, and for control of various personae that may inhabit a text or speak to a particular discourse community or speak within a particular culture. Eighteen essays explore the range of meanings and pedagogical uses of the idea of voice, including Peter Elbow, "What Do We Mean When We Talk about Voice in Texts?"; Doug Minnerly, "Affect and Effect in Voice"; Nancy Allen and Deborah Bosley, "Technical Texts/Personal Voice: Intersections and Crossed Purposes"; Carl Klaus, "The Chameleon 'I': On Voice and Personality"; Margaret Woodworth, "Teaching Voice"; John Albertini, Bonnie Meath-Lang, and David Harris, "Voice as Muse, Message, and Medium: The Views of Deaf College Students"; Tom Carr, "Varieties of the 'Other': Voice and Native American Culture"; John Powers and Gwendolyn Gong, "East Asian Voice and the Expression of Cultural Ethos"; Susan Brown Carlton, "Voice and the Naming of Woman"; Randall Freisinger, "Voicing the Self: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance in a Postmodern Age"; and Peter Elbow and Kathleen Blake Yancey, "An Annotated and Collective Bibliography of Voice."