Bartholome and Writting

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University” From Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook.
Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll and Mike Rose eds. Boston, MA :
Bedford/St. Martin’s 2001.


David Bartholomae makes very good points about students and their writing practices in relation to the professor or teachers they have. In reading this article I found myself in total agreement because I did find that I do this practice myself. It is a practice in which we have to make ourselves sound smart in order to have credibility with our audience. I feel as though sometimes it is the hardest thing I do because I feel something in what I am trying to say is lost. In groups we talked about the fact that this is not true it is not lost at all because it is still the work of a student put together by the student in a certain way to get their point across. Students try to gain this credibility through profession related jargon because it is a “common place” between the professor and the student.
We talked about common places being the ground where people can come together and discuss something and with a certain understanding of common background knowledge. This is the problem for me as a writer in college because I find it hard to necessarily understand to the extent the professor does and it is then intimidating and this is what he article talks about. We as students have to create this place by mimicking professors’ speech and sentence structure in order to figure out what the teacher wants in a paper. All because we as college students or students in general are afraid that if we do not do so then we for not necessarily know what we are talking about and cannot get a good paper. If that is not enough we have to tailor to a certain audience.
Bartholomae focuses much of his essay on keeping the audience in mind. I agree it is important to keep the audience in mind because they are who you are writing for after all. The problem I have is that in order to do this you sometimes have to “dumb down” the content or go beyond your possible realm of knowing. Doing the first can help for a more general understanding of a greater audience serving a greater purpose and the second can have your writing going in circles. We talked about the newspapers and presidential speeches doing this exact thing and in a way it helps for a greater understanding but it is sad that the level of general understanding is so low in the first place. In order to get things more tailored to a certain audience you then have to go to scholarly articles. In the clay model student essay the student seems to go on and on and even winds up talking in circles and this is the problem to writing to a certain audience and to tailoring the jargon beyond you to fit a model put forth by a superior. This is a survival technique carried on throughout jobs past schooling and we may never be able to get past it.