ABSTRACT
If you find yourself consciously avoiding any mention of the personal in your professional writing, ask yourself why you are doing it.… If it’s only because you think you shouldn’t, it might be worth reexamining your assumptions. (Rankin, 2001, p. 69)
As a writer your goal is to find voices within yourself. These voices will, of course, be colored by many outside influences including the books you’ve read, the people you know … but all of these influences should pass through filters of your own psyche and come out imbued with your own touch. (Gardner, 2001, p. 1)
In chapter 1, we explored who we are as writers, looking back on those experiences that have defined our identities and shaped the kind of writers we are now. We examined the traditional conflict between personal and professional writing in chapter 2. In the next four chapters, we offered an overview of the writing process. Although we presented these stages in a linear, chapter-by-chapter rendering, one of our goals was to blur the boundaries between the stages, emphasizing the recursive nature of writing. Also, we hoped you would be able to find yourself at various points along the way. Throughout the text, we invited our friends and colleagues, and called on noted experts in the field of writing, to tell their stories. As you read and considered these stories, we suspect you discovered that you have much in common with these writers. By the same token, we’d like for you to see just how different they are from you and from each other. We believe that both the commonalities and the differences bring us together as writers who
share a common destination, but who sometimes follow quite different routes to get there.
