Emphasizing Personal Experience and Authority: Some students think that academic writing excludes personal experience. Some even go so far as to think that they can't use the word "I" in a paper. We want to show that, although this might be true in some academic writing situations, it is not true in all academic writing. In this assignment in particular, we want you to use your personal experience. After all, if you're writing about your own life, you need to be able to talk about it. Equally important, we want to begin our semester-long discussion of language with your experiences with language.
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