Renovating the Personal

The sequence of exercises described here represents a version of an essay we often assign our students in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) at New York University. Borrowing the concept of “the positionality story” from Christina V. Cedillo and Phil Bratta (2019), we advocate for reconceptualizing the personal (writing about personal experience) as the positional (confronting the social, cultural, and linguistic factors that shape and differentiate one’s personal experience from another’s). While drawing on the personal to embolden a student’s voice, motivate probing analytic work, and create innovative writing communities has been a long standing practice of ours, the move to the positional is a new approach that, we find, helps today’s NYU students become more rhetorically and culturally “attuned” to our globally and linguistically inclusive institutional writing environment (see Leonard 2014).