SEVEN“IN MY EXPERIENCE”Using Personal Stories to Energize Your Argument

OUR COLLEAGUE STEVE BENTON often finds that his students’ writing significantly improves when it includes a personal story. In one such case, Benton tells us, he received an essay from a student named Felicity Noahubi, in which she defended going to college on the grounds that it helps people get better jobs. But when Benton asked Felicity why she thought it was important to make this argument—the “so what?” question, as we call it—she explained that she had an aunt who, in her job in a meat-processing factory, used to work a mechanical cutting saw that vibrated so intensely that she eventually required surgery on her hands. Why not revise your essay, Benton asked, and make this story central to your argument? Felicity did, and it made her essay much more powerful and compelling.

We open the chapter this way because it helps overturn the common perception that personal experiences and stories have no place in academic argumentative writing. All too often, it is thought, while such personal material is OK for the early grades, it’s off limits in the advanced world of college, that personal experience and academic, college-level argument are opposites. To be sure, a more personal voice may not be welcome in the sciences and mathematics, but even in those fields the issue is far from simple. Ask even the most high-powered academics why they became physicists or economists and you’ll likely hear a personal story. Once you start looking for it, you’ll probably be surprised to find how often the writers you read in college draw on their personal experiences, and how you can energize your own writing by doing the same. Indeed, a personal story can be used to make virtually all the “moves that matter in academic writing” covered in this book, the “they say / I say” move chief among them:

Although it is often said that __________, a recent experience I had suggests __________.

To be effective, however, personal stories need to be used with care. Such stories, once again, will not be appropriate for every academic assignment, especially in some sciences. And they cannot take the place of abstract scholarly claims, references to established research, or statistics, which enable us to move beyond our private experiences and generalize about large numbers of cases.

At the same time, personal stories can be an appealing way to enliven standard scholarly content and even to shape such content. Imagine, for instance, how an otherwise straightforward argument about an assigned text might be presented as a mini-story:

The other night, when I told my roommates about author X’s argument, that __________, they responded that X seemed to be overlooking __________. I agree, and would even add that __________.

You might also imagine how a story could be used to address the kind of objection we discuss in Chapter 6:

When my stepmother read an early draft of this paper, she exclaimed, “__________?” And I had to admit that __________. Nevertheless, I still would argue __________.

use personal experience to establish your credibility

Personal stories can also be a helpful way to establish your credibility as a writer. For instance, consider how the founder of the Chicago Basketball Academy (CBA), Damond Williams, uses personal experience to establish his credentials as someone who has “been there” and knows something about his subject from the inside. In a book Williams is writing that addresses the lack of career options available to young athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds, he writes:

I know a lot about the challenges of life after basketball because I lived them. As an avid Black basketball player who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, I was always painfully unsure what would happen to me if I couldn’t make a living as a professional athlete. I saw a lot of my peers who were just as passionate about basketball as I was eventually fall prey to idleness or even crime because they had nowhere to turn when they didn’t make it to the pros. I didn’t want to become another negative statistic in my low income community, and I felt like I was on an island all by myself. As it turned out, I did achieve a certain level of success in college and, afterward, in professional leagues overseas, but I always knew that my athletic career was only temporary, and that something else would be needed when it was time to hang it up.

DAMOND WILLIAMS, The Basketball Economy

Williams founded the CBA, he explains, to be that “something else” and provide the kind of career alternatives that many disadvantaged athletes need. Without his personal story, readers might wonder what authority Williams has for writing about his subject, and why he in particular chose to make the CBA his life’s mission.

use stories to dramatize your “they say” and “i say”

A personal story can also be a useful way to make the “they say / I say” move, as we can see in the opening to a 2022 article by Beth Macy, author of the book-turned-cable-series Dopesick. In “A Simple Way to End the Opioid Epidemic,” Macy dramatizes one of the many fault lines in our increasingly polarized society, admitting that the Indiana sheriffs she gave a talk to in 2020 viewed her liberal position with open scorn. Macy explains that, as she stood at the podium, she made the case that, instead of arresting addicts and sending them to jail, we should enter them in treatment centers and offer them medication to curb their addiction. But her conservative audience would have none of it. One sheriff, for instance, caustically called out, “ ‘They’re clean when they leave my jail’ ”; and when her talk ended, she “was met with the sound of a solitary audience member slow-clapping.”

You might think the last thing Macy would want to foreground would be this kind of ridicule she was greeted with. For an expert writer like Macy, however, it’s a perfect “they say” to set up her own argument.

For another example of how stories can be used to make the “they say / I say” move, consider poet-critic Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2016 essay, “Go Ahead: Waste Time on the Internet,” in which Goldsmith complicates the view “that in the age of screens we’ve lost our ability to concentrate.” Goldsmith writes:

To read Goldsmith’s article, see pp. 361–65.

The other night I walked into the living room and my wife was glued to her iPad, reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Hours later, when I headed to bed, she hadn’t moved an inch, still transfixed by the 171-year-old narrative on her 21st-century device. When I said good night, she didn’t even look up.

Through this story, Goldsmith clearly challenges what “they say”: that screens impair our ability to concentrate.

A few paragraphs later, Goldsmith tells another story to challenge a related “they say”: the common view that computers make us “antisocial.” He writes:

After reading one of those hysterical “devices are ruining your child” articles, my sister-in-law decided to take action. She imposed a system whereby, after dinner, the children were to “turn in” their devices—computers, smartphones, and tablets. . . . Upon confiscating my nephew’s cell phone one Friday night, she asked him on Saturday morning, “What plans do you have with your friends today?” “None,” he responded. “You took away my phone.”

In other words, these stories suggest, although we often vilify the internet, we need to appreciate its social and cultural virtues.

Using Goldsmith as a model, you might write:

Many often worry that __________. But the other night I __________.

And following Macy’s trick of transforming a potentially painful experience into a “they say / I say” story, you might use a template like:

I knew there was a problem the instant I __________. When I suggested __________, I was met with __________. When I proposed __________, X told me __________. It may be true, I grant, that __________. But I still hold to my belief that __________.

use a story to revise what you used to think

Stories can also help you answer not only what others say, but what you yourself used to say or think, as the legal theorist and political activist Michelle Alexander demonstrates in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Recalling a day years earlier when she happened across a poster on a telephone pole that read, “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW,” Alexander writes:

I paused for a moment, and skimmed the text . . . about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, and the expansion of America’s prison system. . . . I sighed, and muttered to myself something like, “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.”

Years later, however, Alexander realized that she’d been mistaken, that the comparison she’d formerly dismissed was actually right. After more than a decade of legal work against racial discrimination, she explains,

I had come to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy. . . . Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a matter strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

In fact, Alexander came belatedly to see the poster as so convincing that she used its claim about the “New Jim Crow” as her book’s very title. What we get here, then, is a classic “I used to think / but now I realize” argument presented in narrative form. Like Williams, Macy, and Goldsmith, Alexander could have relied solely on abstract generalizations to make her case, but it is made more engaging and powerful by her use of the kind of first-person language usually found in short stories and novels:

“I paused . . .”

“I sighed and muttered . . .”

“I came to see . . .”

Following Alexander, you might write:

There once was a time when I was passionately committed to the idea that __________. I remember encountering a __________ one day and thinking __________. Now, however, having __________, I have come to realize __________.

use a story to begin with a bang

A personal story can also be an effective way to open a text, as the example above from Beth Macy suggests. Consider also how the journalist Anna Clark opens with a story about her parents in her 2015 article “Why We Need to Keep the ‘Community’ in Community Colleges”:

My parents took turns going to college. While raising three kids, my father lost his left big toe in an accident at a tool-and-die shop and Mom babysat dozens of neighborhood rugrats. We didn’t have enough. The kitchen cabinets were too bare. So, Dad signed up for classes at Lake Michigan College, the two-year school formerly known as Benton Harbor Community College.

With his hands cupping his chin at a lamplit table, he softly read aloud from his textbooks; for years, his murmuring carried down the hallway to my bedroom, like a lullaby. When I was 11, he earned his bachelor’s degree through an extension program hosted by LMC and got a job at Whirlpool Corporation. Then it was Mom’s turn. She did her homework alongside my siblings and [me] at the kitchen table. The same year I graduated high school, she earned her associate’s degree, on her way to her own B.A. My mother and I posed in front of the fireplace, each in cap and gown, grinning for the camera, for each other, for wherever it was we were headed next.

It is not a coincidence that my parents are the only people I’ve witnessed who have worked their way out of poverty. With open admission and low-cost tuition, community colleges are the champions of people just like them: full-time workers and parents; older folks and younger ones; military veterans and people who speak English as a second language. That is, the true multiplicity of our communities.

But there is an escalating movement of community colleges dropping the word “community” from their names. . . .

This opening succeeds, we think, in grabbing the reader’s attention. It also sets up the “they say” Clark is challenging: namely, the view that community colleges should drop the word “community” from their titles. Such a change, Clark insists, will only erase the institutions’ most laudable and distinctive feature, their openness to everyone, including working adults like her parents.

view your story through an argumentative lens

Perhaps the most important thing to remember, then, when including personal experience in your writing is to use it in the service of a larger moral or argument.

I tell this story because it shows __________.

Few things are more annoying than reading—or listening to!—a story that hooks you in with an engaging incident that, in the end, doesn’t go anywhere and lacks a discernible point. To avoid this common problem, you need to think of your personal experiences through an academic lens and present them not just as events that are interesting in and of themselves, but as arguments in a larger debate or conversation. Though this intellectual way of thinking may feel strange at first and take some getting used to, it’s precisely what allows Clark to present her parents’ stories as critiques of a new trend in education, and what allows Goldsmith to present his sister-in-law’s parenting experience as an argument in defense of surfing the internet.

This intellectual way of seeing is what allows the influential education writer Mike Rose to turn his mother’s career as a waitress into an argument about working-class labor in his 2009 article “Blue Collar Brilliance.” Challenging the common assumption that manual work requires brawn but not brains, Rose describes how his mother’s waitressing job, far from being mindless, involved the kind of cognitive “brilliance” named in his title.

For instance, Rose explains, as a waitress, his mother had to master an esoteric, specialized vocabulary:

Fry four on two, my mother would say as she clipped a check onto the metal wheel. Her tables were deuces, four-tops, or six-tops according to their size; seating areas also were nicknamed. The racetrack, for instance, was the fast-turnover front section. Lingo conferred authority and signaled know-how.

Waiting on as many as nine tables at a time, his mother also had to learn to juggle a host of competing demands and “devised memory strategies so that she could remember who ordered what.”

[She] took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding questions about food. She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand. She stood at a table or booth and removed a plate for this person, another for that person, then another, remembering who had the hamburger, who had the fried shrimp, almost always getting it right.

In general, Rose explains that, though his mother only had a seventh-grade education:

[She] learned to work smart, as she put it, to make every move count. She’d sequence and group tasks: What could she do first, then second, then third as she circled through her station? What tasks could be clustered? She did everything on the fly, and when problems arose—technical or human—she solved them within the flow of her work.

Rose’s story, then, serves a clear argumentative purpose: to challenge our culture’s tendency to see intelligence as an abstract quality “based solely on grades in school and numbers on IQ tests.” On the contrary, Rose argues, there is an alternate type of intelligence that is just as important, one based on the sorts of “hands-on knowledge” and “thinking in motion” that blue collar work like his mother’s embodies. In this way, Rose’s story is not just a sequence of events, but an argument about the kind of work our culture does or does not value.

Using Personal Stories in Academic Writing

Watch the video below to see how one student writer uses his personal experiences in a research essay to support his argument about perceptions of anxiety.

make sure your story and argument match

Given how important it is to use any story you tell to make a larger argument, it is also important to ensure that your story and argument are in sync—that your story says what you say it says. Often, the two of us find, it’s easy to come up with a personal story that looks from a distance as if it’s going to support the argument we want to make, only to realize as we start writing that the story has gotten away from us and created the kind of “uh-oh moment” that we discuss in Chapter 12, on revision.

Such problems arise because, like other forms of evidence, personal narratives can have an unintended reverse effect that allows readers to wrest their meanings away from you. In fact, it might even be argued that such unintended effects are inevitable, that no matter how well chosen and crafted it may be, almost any personal story you tell can be used against you. After all, just because the personal experience you’re relaying happens to be your own, it doesn’t mean that you’re the expert on it, that nobody else can say what it means. Readers can always make a version of the “twist it” move we discuss in Chapter 4 and interpret your experience very differently.

Imagine, for instance, how skeptical readers might use Kenneth Goldsmith’s story about his wife’s online reading against him. Couldn’t they see her deep absorption in the ebook she was reading not as a point in favor of the internet, but as a strike against it? Specifically, couldn’t they interpret his wife’s near obliviousness to his presence as evidence that the internet, far from fostering social interaction as Goldsmith insists, actually undermines such interaction and even furthers anti-social behavior?

To disarm such unwelcome counter-readings, it’s a good idea to follow any personal stories you tell with a template for anticipating naysayers like those we provide in Chapter 6, as in:

Lest anyone read this story as evidence that __________, I would point out that __________.

draw on your academic experience

Nevertheless, in the end you may still wonder if your personal experiences will carry much weight in the high-level academic arena. “Can I really make a trip to the mall or last week’s family picnic relevant to academic subjects? Can an ‘intellectual way of seeing’ really make a story about my dog relevant to my course in macroeconomics?” Perhaps—or perhaps not. But there is at least one domain of your experience that’s bound to be relevant to any course or assignment: what you learned in another academic setting—another college course, say, or even in elementary or high school.

Note, for instance, how the New York Times culture critic Maya Phillips opens a review of a play about women’s suffrage. Drawing a contrast between the play and what she’d learned in her “grade school history books,” Phillips writes:

I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points—Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment—and the suffragists dismissed as self-serious rabble-rousers.

To contradict those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” . . . begins. . . .

MAYA PHILLIPS, “Young, Scrappy, and Hungry for the Right to Vote”

Following Phillips, you might use a template like the following:

A central lesson of my English course last semester was that __________. But author X, whom we are reading in this history course, suggests __________. My own opinion is that __________ has the better argument, largely because __________.

Templates like this can help you build bridges in your studies, making connections between texts, courses, and subjects that you might not otherwise notice and that educators should appreciate.

As we were writing this chapter, we couldn’t stop thinking about a student we once had who said that, while he was willing to engage in it when necessary, “academic writing just isn’t me.” While we concede that some academic writing requires a degree of formality that can feel foreign, we also argue that it has room for deeply personal experiences that may initially look nonacademic. In this respect, our point in this chapter is similar to the one Gerald makes in his essay included in the back of this book, “Hidden Intellectualism”: that there is no experience, no matter how seemingly humble—a spouse’s leisure-time reading, your mother’s waitressing job, a poster stapled to a telephone pole—that can’t be made academically relevant if you view it “through academic eyes.”

Exercises

Try using the following templates to practice connecting a personal experience to a broader debate or conversation. Feel free to modify the templates if necessary:
- An experience I had sheds light on the controversial issue of __________.
- The point I draw from this incident is __________.
Now imagine somebody objecting that the experience you related above should be interpreted differently from the way you interpreted it. Using the following template or a version of it, add two or three sentences to what you wrote in which you summarize and answer this objection:
- Of course, some may read my experience as illustrating not __________, but __________. They would argue, in other words, that __________. I would respond, however, by pointing out that __________.
Following the example from Maya Phillips on page 109, tell a story about something that you learned in one course and explain how it supports or conflicts (or both) with something you learned in another course.