Bartholomae and Ghostbusters

1.22.2013 Bartholomae and Ghostbusters.

I read this piece this summer and wish I had remembered to re-read it during Dr. Mara’s Invention & Innovation class. Love it. DB writes an actually pretty straight forward argument that hinges on two ideas: basic and first-year writers’ writing reflects what we call errors because 1) they are clumsily attempting to locate themselves in a privileged discourse and 2) they are at a stage of cognitive development that limits their ability to do so.

Think of a closed portal, like in Ghostbusters. It’s a limited analogy. The student is Gozer, on one side of the gate, the world of normal discourse, trying to gain entry into the world of privileged discourse. On the other side of the portal is the discourse community into which he or she wants to gain entry. Zuul, the “Gatekeeper’ represents the discourse community’s standards. Vinz Clortho, “The Keymaster,” represents the combination of the student’s cognitive development and knowledge of discourse community’s rhetorical and stylistic moves. Not to intentionally conflate negotiating entrance into a discourse community with the coital act, but there is a complex interplay of factors that influence how the student is allowed entry into the privileged discourse community. Yes, Zuul and Vinz get down: this act of negotiation represents a complex array of factors and tools that come together in the production of the text. As the discourse community is that in which the writer wants to gain entry, then the key is writing: the act of, purpose, cognition of audience and style, author’s sense of self adjusted to the author’s understanding of conventions of discourse community. Basic writers are less adept at this negotiation, i.e., Gozer doesn’t get to New York, and more proficient writers are more adept, i.e., they’re able to unleash the StayPuft Marshmallow Man on Manhattan.

To avoid being too reductive, I’ll explain three points that remain vague in the above analogy. Gina in her excellent post does a nice job of explaining the concept of "successive approximations," so no need to articulate that thread.

First, DB’s idea of commonplace kind of mystifies me because it seems to simultaneously refer to genre, assumptions, and discourse conventions. It’s not all three, but instead a conceptual resource that informs members of the discourse community whether someone is “worthy” of entry: following the above analogy, the idea of commonplace comprises the actual keyhole used. Is the analogy getting weird?

The second bit concerns DB’s expressivist bent. Expressivism, touching on Kinneavy, consists of locating the “I” amid complex social (more immediate contextual forces such as the particular teacher, his/her preferences, etc.) and political (the larger discourse community and its influence on the teacher and writer) forces, somewhat similar to the sense of Being-for-itself negotiating with Being-for-Others and Being-in-the-World. Locating the “I” for DB therefore consists of a process of negotiation: there is a give and take between different actors to achieve a similar goal.

Finally, DB comments on the issue Mike Rose articulates: the problem of instruction as articulation of error. DB responds, in particular, to the assumption that teaching basic writers consists of fixing them so we can put them in more privileged situations. The problem with that, according to DB, is that error-rectification reduces a varied array of mostly idiosyncratic factors that lead to errors, ignoring the individual writer’s cognitive development. By extension, first-year writing instruction that focuses only on rectifying errors ignores students’ cognitive development. To the point, DB suggests that in addition to attending to a writer’s cognitive development, the rhetorical factors that influence entrance into the academic discourse community be addressed, looking more at what the student can do rather than what the student has done incorrectly. In other words, strategy instruction instead of copious red marks, if I estimate DB’s assumption correctly.