Starting from a personal essay
A personal essay generates the questions, a multimodal self-portrait carries them into other modes, scholarly discussion posts bring in the field, and an autoethnography closes the course as real research.
Process: Directed drafting1 round of revision
- Personal
The Personal Essay
1,000–1,250 words in language alone. The goal is to find what you'd want to research.
- Multimodal
Digital Writer Self-Portrait
1,500 words or the equivalent, in 3–5 modes, for an audience the student chooses.
- Research
Composition Studies Synthesis Posts
Three posts, about 700 words in all, in conversation with scholarship and classmates.
- Research
Autoethnography as capstone
1,800 words of research on primary data about the student's own writing.
What carries forward
The essay is invention for everything after it. The syllabus says it outright: students expand from personal essays into other genres.
This is the only combination where the autoethnography comes last. By then students have written about themselves, made something in other modes, and talked with the field, so the autoethnography reads as a research method they’ve earned, not a warm-up.
It also avoids the problem in the online combination, where the second and third projects use nearly the same method. Here the research is a different kind: scholarly discussion first, then primary data.
How it runs
In person, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with Fridays as workshop days. Four major assignments add up to 5,000–6,000 words.
Grading is split five ways at 20% each: attendance and participation, the synthesis posts, and a portfolio holding the essay, the self-portrait, and the autoethnography.
Where I've used it
- 15 weeks, in person · Spring 2026