Please, dear colleges that I work for, do not make the personal essay part of the curriculum.
When you make the personal essay part of the curriculum, I am forced to read things I don’t want to read.
I am forced to know things, about actual strangers, that I don’t want to know.
And, in the midst of the personal essay that I may be reading about getting sexually abused while in jail for weed possession I am supposed to critique commas and verb tense.
Or while I am reading about an “adult” student who was denied food by her foster family, I am supposed to talk about dangling modifiers with her.
The personal essay, in a college-essay-writing course, is irrelevant, unhelpful, and a whole freaking can of privacy and boundary worms.
It forces me, the lowly adjunct, to send out emails like this:
SO, I AM BEGGING YOU, English department chairs the world over and then some, stop the madness. DUMP the personal essay. Or, at the very least, make the math teachers grade it.
Dianne Pearce Writes 