You were put into small groups, given chunks of the first two sections of David Bartholomae's Inventing the University, and asked to summarize the main points in each paragraph and take notes on (a) the major points of each paragraph, and (b) rhetorical techniques that Bartholomae used in making his points. Here's what we constructed as a group.
I encourage you to do this with your own writing as you revise, or to follow (some variation on) this process with dense articles that you are assigned in other classes!
Section I
Group 1: pp. 134–36
The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community.
He [sic] must learn to speak our language. Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is learned.
Example of collect writing placement test, supporting previous paragraph.
He knew that university faculty would be reading and evaluating his essay, and so he wrote for them.
Defines himself as a researcher.
Attempts to take on the language of university faculty.
Knows who his audience is & writes to them.
Assumes voice of authority in writing.
Group 2:136–39
He is trying on the discourse even though he doesn't have the knowledge that would make the discourse more than a routine, a set of conventional rituals and gestures.
It is hard for students to take on the role—the voice, the persona—of an authority, which is rooted in scholarship, analysis, and research.
A commonplace is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration.
In order to speak as a person of status or privilege, the writer can either speak to us on our terms or, in defiance of that, he can speak to us as though we were children, offering us the wisdom of experience.
There is a context beyond the intended reader—a world of examples, possible conclusions, acceptable commonplaces, and key words for the example essay of the clay model of the earth.
Linda Flower has argued that the difficultly inexperienced writers have when writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between writer-based and reader-based prose.
Section II
Group 3: pp. 139–42
You should write for your audience. Build bridges between your point of view and the reader's. Composition teachers expect this from students.
Students are expected to write as authorities even if they don't have the knowledge and experience to actually qualify as authorities.
It is hard to get around this problem of power & finesse because students speaking to teachers experience an inherent power differential. Lists different tactics for dealing with the problem, but nothing really redresses the balance.
Example of Seventeen magazing as an example of how writing with your reader in mind can work well for someone.
You have to be in a certain mental state to write to a certain audience.
Summary of Flower & Hayes's ideas, including a quote.
Flower & Hayes think that writing is solely based on writer & reader does not influence; some elaboration on this idea in this paragraph.
Group 4: pp. 142–145
Discusses process vs. product in writing.
All writing is influenced by other writing that came before it.
Style is based on expectations of audience expectations.
Academic writing caters to the needs of the task it sets out to accomplish. Encouraging students to believe they need to be original is dangers.
Writing for teachers: must assume role and voice of a person with more authority than is actually the case.
quote: in summary,
student writing
is problem-solving
non-student writing
is projects
Students aren't integrated into material.
Bereiter and Scardamalia on knowledge-telling discourse as the kind of discourse students engage in when trying to act as authoritative experts.
Group 5: pp. 145–147
There is, to be sure, an important distinction to be made between learning history, say, and learning to write as a historian.
tend toward a certain audience
understanding the info is different from just quickly learning it.
I do, however, expect my students to be, themselves, invented as literary critics by approximating the language of a literary critic writing about Bleak House.
outside influences on their writing
their writing is a product of their environment
The students' essays are evidence of a discourse that lies between these two hypothetical poles.
(Bizzell on basic writers)
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.
Teachers, as a result, could be more precise and helpful when they ask students to 'think,' 'argue,' 'describe,' or 'define.'
taught what the community thinks
teaching cognitive skills
(I will be concerned with the difficult, and often violent accommodations that occur when students locate themselves in a discourse that is not naturally or immediately theirs.)