These situations of failure and shame, in turn, appear to set up students unsure of their career goals or their abilities for decreased performance and motivation as the class progresses—whether or not they began the class with high motivation and ability (Turner & Schallert, 2001). Composition teachers should not add to their first-year students’ distress by assigning the generic memoir. Out of respect for the power of memoirs recounting trauma for the writer and for the unspoken courage trauma survivors demonstrate in risking exposure of their vulnerabilities, how and when students share their accounts of traumatic events should be at their informed discretion—and well after the students have learned to establish their own authority and voice in academic discourse.

For activist educators, this phrase “students’ establishment of authority and voice in academic discourse” can signal many arguments about personal writing that I am not making in this paper. I am not arguing that personal writing, especially the type suggested in the concept of “embodied writing” as articulated by Jane Hindman (2001), does not belong in academic writing. I am instead arguing that because the generic memoir makes the self a public object of scrutiny, poor social reception of the narratives can be understood as poor social reception of the narrators—and all the traumatic experiences affecting public presentation of those selves—within the academic institution. Students already concerned about their ability to succeed in college may read that poor reception as a sign of their own irremediable unfitness for college life. Objectifying the self turns the self into a commodity, and in an era in which commodities are more often replaced than remade, objectifying the self suggests that some students are expendable, should be thrown out, or should remove themselves before they are removed.