Robert J. Nash has an interesting book Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative. In this book, he makes the case that personal narrative writing can be scholarly and rigorous and allow the author to tell the story of their life/understanding in a manner that traditional objective, academic styles cannot. He provides some general guidelines, highlights some of the best master and doctoral theses from his own experiences, and gives some advise on how to deal with the difficulties of challenging traditional academic writing.He recounts listening to a panel of African-American writers on C-Span and one writer said, "Reflection is not writing. Research is not writing. Note taking is not writing. Talking about writing is not writing. Planning for writing is not writing. Writing is writing. Hear me say this again: Writing is writing." (page 156).
