Advanced Expository Writing Mini Essay

the basic instruction is this: “Do you agree with Murray that all writing and reading are autobiographical? Why or why not? Support your arguments with specific references to Murray’s text.”
In this article, Donald Murray points to the nature of autobiography—its complexity and multiplicity—by including a series of direct statements (or claims) about it. Here are three such statements (italics are mine):
I publish in many forms—poetry, fiction, academic article, essay, newspaper column, newsletter, textbook, juvenile nonfiction and I have even been a ghost writer for corporate and government leaders—yet when I am at my writing desk I am the same person. (66)
He [Brock Dethier] answered my question, “What is autobiographical in this poem?” by saying, “Your thinking style, your voice.” Of course. (67)
We become what we write. (71)
Murray asserts that these claims apply to all of us as writers—not only to himself. To support these assertions, he takes examples of his own writing (three poems, a newspaper column, a passage from a novel, and a passage from a writing textbook) and interprets them in light of his argument.
In an essay of two to three typed, double-spaced pages (about five-hundred words, descriptively titled), evaluate Murray’s claims by looking closely at several of the texts he uses—as well the commentary he provides about them. What does each text (as well his commentary about it) express to you about Murray, about his preoccupations and his character, and about the ways he interprets experience and approaches the writing process (as well as the teaching of writing)? What patterns, if any, do you see in the way that he selects and interprets his texts—and places them at particular points in his argument? And what does your analysis suggest to you—not only about the validity of Murray’s argument (i.e., that all writing is autobiography) but also about the larger implications of such an argument? What does it mean to say, “[A]ll writing is autobiography”? What might such an argument add to your understanding: not only of others’ writing but also of your own? And what does such an argument mean to you as a writer and a student at a university?

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