1. Why and How to Use Research in Personal Writing
2. In their guide to writing creative nonfiction Writing True,
Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz talk about the central
role of research to writing nonfiction essays of the sort
that we’ve been doing for this class: “It can jog the
memory, trigger the imagination, provide new insights
and perspectives, add verisimilitude, deepen cultural
and historic contexts,” they write. But, they add, the aim
of essay writing is to make research blend in with the
story so the reader doesn’t notice it, just experiences
it. This is obviously a very different use of research than
academic writing, where the aim is to be very clear
about citing the work on which your argument builds.
“How to gather,
select, and process
new information so
that readers feel as
if the writer just
happens to know
it?”
-Schwartz and Perl, 145
3. Let’s look at this passage from Chuck Klosterman’s
essay “March 24, 1984,” for instance.
“Sociologist and Teenage Wasteland author Donna Gaines
described the teen metal audience as a suburban, white,
alcoholic subculture, and she’s completely correct. The only
drugs that go with ‘hard’ metal are bottles of booze (and
cocaine if you can afford it, which you probably can’t if you
spend all your time listening to Who Made Who)”(19).
4. We can pretty clearly see the research that
Klosterman incorporates in the quote – it’s from a
book by Donna Gaines called Teenage Wasteland.
Why does Klosterman feel the next to reference
Gaines’s book in his essay? Well, it might be because
in this sentence he’s making a claim about who
listens to metal; and while he has already said that
he and his (rural, white) friends did, he wants to
situate his anecdotal evidence into a larger cultural
context. Gaines’s book (because it takes a wider
historical view of the subject) helps him do that.
However, unlike in academic writing, Klosterman
doesn’t tell us exactly where he found the
information in Gaines’s book. This is called informal
citation.
5. using informal citation:
When including material (quotes or paraphrase) in a personal
essay that comes from a secondary source, include as much
information about the source as you can without interrupting the
flow of the writing. This means you could at least use the
author’s name and possibly the title of the source, but generally
not page numbers.
6. Other types of research in personal writing
might include…
• research on historical (or other) facts: from the internet,
print media sources, etc. If it’s questionable, find more than
one source that can confirm it.
• interviews from family members (if it’s a personal historical
essay, for example), other people who have first-hand
knowledge of what you’re talking about
7. “Hell, Dion never even went to high school: she’d already
dropped out to pursue show biz, as the best hope of her
impoverished, fourteen-sibling, French-Canadian family.
The entertainment sector she joined was that holdover
from the days before pop went subcultural, ‘adult
contemporary.’ On Let’s Talk About Love, at twenty-nine,
she was duetting with the Bee Gees, Barbara Streisand and
Luciano Pavarotti, people in their fifties, sixties, and
seventies”(138).
How do you think Wilson found out the
information about Celine Dion in the following
passage?
8. Use a strong, original voice to incorporate research
seamlessly.
That means you’ll need to have “internalized” your source
material to some extent before you write about it –
otherwise, it risks sounding more like the source it came
from and interrupts the flow of your essay.
Resist the temptation to incorporate ALL the research you
did – try to ascertain the most important information, and
include only that.
