Murray Reading Response

Summary

In his article “All Writing Is Autobiographical”, Donald Murray attempts to convince his audience of fellow scholars and teachers that all writing, regardless of genre, contains within it some personal aspects of the writer. He wants his audience to acknowledge this fact so that they can allow their students to overcome the construct of keeping themselves out of their writing. He wants teachers to teach their students that inserting oneself into one’s writing is necessary and indeed impossible to do otherwise.

 

Synthesis

            Murray helps to overcome the construct of not using the first person in academic writing by utilizing it in his own academic writing, much like Kleine and Kantz. His use of personal narrative in this article is also reminiscent of Kleine and his story of the night library. Kantz even helps to support Murray’s claim that “all writing is autobiographical” when she freely admits that Shirley is an amalgamation of several students, herself included.

 

Prewriting Exercise

            I was initially taught that my writing in the school and business spheres should be objective and impersonal. Like many high schoolers, I was instructed never to use the first person in my writing if I wanted my claims to be taken seriously.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Murray is asking for his readers to question the long standing construct of objectivity as the standard of writing, that the author has no business inserting herself into her writing.

 

3) Murray breaks the academic mold in many ways; he uses the first person, he quotes lengthy passages of his own creative writing, and his tone is informal. He uses these writing methods as rhetorical tools to prove his point that all writing is autobiographical. By using the first person, he shows that an author can both write autobiographically and maintain his validity in a scholarly article. By quoting his own creative writing, he can prove his point that throughout different genres, writing always contains a piece of the author, either what he was before he wrote it or what that writing made him become.

 

4) What makes Murray’s article scholarly is that he is addressing a community of scholars, he cites what other scholars have contributed to the conversation, and he demonstrated his point by citing passages of his own writing that he could dissect as intensely autobiographical

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

 

2) All writing is personal; our interests and ideas are shaped by who we are and what experiences we have had. Furthermore, what we write can change who we think we are and how we view past experiences. It is impossible to keep yourself out of your writing because writing is a creative endeavor, and therefore highly personal.

 

Meta Moment

 

            Understanding what Murray has to say about all writing being autobiographical can help me in my own writing, both by opening my eyes to connections between my writing and who I am (even if I was unaware of it before), and by making me realize that it is alright and even desirable for me to explore autobiographical themes.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

            I think Murray’s essay is highly readable, which helps to further drive home the point he is trying to make. Here we see a man allowed to explore autobiographical themes throughout his career, and we see how he has flourished not only as a creative writer, but as an academic one as well.