While literacy autobiographies, citizenship autobiographies, and family narratives are common first writing assignments in the freshmen composition classroom, they are usually followed by some kind of research proposal, annotated bibliography, or research essay. While there is nothing wrong with literacy and citizenship autobiographies or family…

Because children are experts in at least one subject--themselves--their best written work is usually autobiographical. This article suggests various specific autobiographical writing assignments teachers might want to use with their students. (JMK)

Shows how the eagerness to learn and the wealth of experience of senior adults makes a composition course in autobiography particularly effective for such students. (JL)

Describes a writing exercise useful for students who have already shown some facility in writing about personal experiences and that emphasizes the narrowing of scope and time in a reminiscence and developing it with detail in order to make it more interesting for others. (HTH)

Autobiographical writing can, by its nature as expressive discourse, connect to the residual orality and literacy that students possess before they enter college writing classes, because it crosses more easily between the spoken word and the written word than other forms of writing. Adapting the Ong-Havelock orality-literacy thesis to writing…

Describes how students are able to empathize with women writers and each other by reading and writing autobiography. (CRH)

Students cannot trace all the sources that inform who they are at a given moment, but all of them can explore a wide range of sources that inform their sense of self, clarify their values and their relationships to the world and others in it. Writing about family fits especially well into a sequence in which students narrate a personal experience,…

Teaching college writing students to edit the autobiographical writing of others has many advantages. Autobiographical materials, such as diaries, letters, or journals, are physically and psychologically accessible for students, and as editors they would be obliged to keep in mind appropriateness of language, tone, and simplicity or complexity of…

Explains how students can enhance their writing skills and strategies by examining prose models concurrent with their own writing. (HOD)

Describes how technical writing teachers, by using a system of peer critiques, self evaluation, and portfolio grading, can use process activities (student literacy autobiographies, interviews with professional writers, and writing peer groups) to extend the range of activities in technical writing courses. (MM)

By following the "steppingstone" or marker theory of dividing one's life into no more than 12 and no less than 8 significant periods, a student in a writing course can develop a brief response for each phase to articulate multiple experiences. Writing teachers can aid students in realizing that important life experiences are the stuff of…