Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-165. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. 589-619.
Summary:
"Inventing the University" means learning to speak the language of higher education--more specifically, having to speak (and write) the discourses of the various communities (usually, academic disciplines) of college. This skill is asked of students quite quickly, usually before the skill is "learned," and this can cause problems. Most college freshman do not yet know the conventions, they do not yet know the jargon, and they cannot yet create (or sustain) a voice of authority, particularly when the audience is their professors; the students may be aware of this "privileged" language, but they cannot yet control it. In section II, Bartholomae reviews the general theory of audience awareness, the cognitive theorists’ view of the composing process compared to the social theorists’ view, and contemporary rhetorical theory’s concept of “’codes’ that constitute discourse” and applies them to the idea of "inventing the university." In section III, Bartholomae provides and then analyzes five representative samples of student writing (out of 500 placement essays reviewed), eventually ranking them based on how the writers’ "ability to imagine privilege enabled writing" (607). Ultimately, educators must accept that as our students struggle with a difficult and unfamiliar language, their papers will not be error-free nor have elegant syntax.
Why It Was Important to Me:
- "Discourse communities"--also, "interpretive communities" (Fish)
- Definition(s) of "basic writers"
- Definition(s) of "commonplace"
- "Writer-based prose" vs. "reader-based prose"
- Cognitive vs. social-epistemic composing theories
- Types or frequencies of error
- "Much of the written work that students do is test-taking, report, or summary--work that places them outside the official discourse of the academic community, where they are expected to admire and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they can do its work and participate in a common enterprise" (599).
- "One response to the problems of basic writers, then, would be to determine just what the community’s conventions are, so that those conventions could be written out, 'demystified' and taught in our classrooms" (601).
- "In fact, one of the problems with curricula designed to aid basic writers is that they too often begin with the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence-level error" (612).
- Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York: Norton, 2006.
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