One of the reasons we English teachers first fell in love with ISearch papers was the variety of sources the process makes use of. This was about 1979-1980. Hard to believe that there was a time with no internet, nothing but libraries to go to for information! Kenn Macrorie who was the guy who came up with the idea in his book, I Search, suggested such radical ideas as interview people, look at a movie, visit a place and hang out. Wow! Freedom! Later, as the internet became more and more in use by scholars for research, the process worked just as well, but back then: what a novelty!

His basic idea had to do with why not have students write about things that were really important to them. Why insist on having them search for things that had already been searched? The "I" replaced the "Re" in thinking about the kind of research this was really about: what do "I" care about...really care about.

He suggested some general topics of things people care about in their lives that really matter: can I become a fireman? what kind of car should I buy? what does it mean that I have Parkinson's disease? why did my grandparents leave their country to come to America?

And when we collected our first set of ISearch papers, we discovered the next great thing: unlike research papers, ISearch were really interesting to read! We found ourselves spending more time on them because the writers wrote out of genuine interest and this made the writing great fun to read. What a concept!

The academic purists who could not see at first how this method would help in scholarly work, we used the same MLA citations and source lists as any other research paper. Moreover, the interesting (to the student) topics helped develop writing skills simply because the writers had much more of a feeling of ownership for the papers than they once did. One more moreover was that Isearch papers were easy to translate into academic papers; students simply changed the case from first to third person. The research was valid, the sources were valid--at least as valid as any other research.

And the final capper had to do with our own experience writing Isearch papers. I have written them up through graduate school. They really are fun. My sense was and is that I got as much if not more academic payoffs than writing a more traditional paper. I learned more, I researched more, I considered going to sources other than the printed page. I was a "free writer"--wow, I made a joke. Thank you for noticing.