For one instructor, learning that personal response, particularly emotions, had no place in the construction of a public self began in high school senior English class where students learned to never use personal pronouns in their writing. The lesson continued in college where she majored in journalism and literature under the direction of text-focused New Critics. However, required readings in a graduate seminar made impersonal criticism difficult, if not impossible. A search for different critical approaches introduced literary critics, feminist scholars, and compositionists who welcome the instruction of the personal into scholarship. Echoing social constructionists, these theorists and teachers question the detached, objective reader and researcher as valued model by showing why this role is impossible and even undesirable. The meaning of literary text is located in the reader's self and interpretive strategies. Personal, interactive reading can be messy, however, sabotaging efforts to produce carefully tailored prose. Practicing discourse diversity, writing autobiographically, is fraught with risks, especially for academic women--they risk not being heard in a climate that does not always value what women have to say. Remarks from student papers in a Composition 101 class offer anecdotal evidence that autobiographical writing options may not eliminate writing anxiety but can generate motivations that will allow students to transcend the "academic exercise" and experience writing and scholarship as personally meaningful and rewarding acts. (Contains 16 references.) (CR)