Bartholomae, week 7

In “Inventing the University,” David Bartholomae discusses how students are required to write in the language of the university before they really know how to do so.  Many students end up imagining their audience as apprentices, offering words of wisdom as opposed to engaging the academic audience in a scholarly discussion.  Bartholomae identifies the central problem of academic writing that many assignments fail to recognize:  “A student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or ‘To His coy Mistress’ than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplace and readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate” (610). 

Bartholomae analyzed many pieces of student writing and came to the conclusion that the best writers are those who are able to imagine privilege, imagine that they know as much as or more about a subject than the audience.  Students who do not imagine this privilege will often write “safe” essays that are perfectly grammatically correct but are rather boring and lack depth and analysis.  Students who are able to imagine the privilege may produce “sentences that fall apart not because the writer lacked the necessary syntax to glue the pieces together but because he lacked the full statement within which these key words were already operating” (625).  These students do not fully understand the discourse they are attempting to speak within (and are thus “faking it,” as Gee might say).  Bartholomae states that the student with the crumbling sentences is actually more prepared to enter scholarly conversation than is the student who sticks to writing safe, grammatically correct essays.  I cannot fully agree with Bartholomae’s statement here. 

I have seen both the safe paper and the daring-but-crumbling paper before, and I had the most difficulty trying to wrap my head around how to respond to the latter. The safe paper needed to push ideas further, but the crumpling paper needed to pull back and untangle ideas.  There were many sentences in the crumbling paper that I did not know how to interpret at all—the meaning was completely lost.  When discussing the ideas presented in both papers, therefore, I could at least ask pointed questions to the writer of the safe paper.  The questions posed to the writer of the crumbling paper, however, could be summed up as “What are you saying?”  The safe paper had a base to build off; the crumbling paper needed to be torn down altogether. 

I am of the mindset that the number one goal in writing is to clearly communicate ideas—as Bartholomae points out, the code is more important than the intention (622).  Although the student with the crumbling paper may in fact have the better intention—to participate in the discourse—the code ends up in worse condition than the student with the less-noble, playing-it-safe intentions. 

Bartholomae states that it would be more difficult to convince the safe student to step out of his or her comfort zone than it would be to convince the daring-but-crumbling paper writer “to continue what he [or she] has already begun” (627).  I want to briefly discuss how Bartholomae understands “easy” and “difficult.”  I do agree that the student with the crumbling paper may be more motivated and willing to work harder than the student with the safe paper, and therefore it may be “easier” to convince him or her to do something.  However, I do not think that the student with the crumbling paper has an easier task set before them (and more motivation is not such a blessing if the given task is also more difficult).  I do not think you would want to convince the daring student to continue on the same path at all, as Barholomae states you should.  On the contrary, I think it would be better to convince such a student to go backwards on the path and perhaps get a map (i.e., understand the discourse within which certain words operate) before starting the journey.  The safe student, on the other hand, has no such backtracking and, I feel, and easier task set before them.