Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Inventing the university response
I found this article a little on the difficult side to understand. In the beginning David Bartholomaes' states how the writers do not know what voice to speak in. He states that beginning writers need to mimic experienced writers style. Students don't necessarily have to be an expert on the issue that they are writing about, all they have to do is act like they are. If students do what Bartholomaes' says, then he thinks that they will be able to open up to a different discourse community. He also says that the student should write in the language of his readers. If they don't know how to do that, it's all really just faking it. Act like you know what you are talking about. I think that this article can relate to Hayes and Flower with the fact that writing is a cognitive process with the goals the writer creates. Along with this article the writer has to also create goals to have a product that a certain community will understand. I can relate to this in some ways. I too have fallen victim to having to produce a paper about something I knew nothing about, but you have to get through it. So, I read up on it and tried to mimic the things that I read and in the end I turned out with a good grade.
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4 comments:
Crystal,
I think that you and I understood this article in similar ways. At first I didn't agree with pretending to know about something that you really have no clue about but I can see how it could work. Bartholomae's article says that even if we don't know what the heck we are talking about that we should pretend that we are. I think it would be difficult at first but believable to the discourse community.
Cheers,
Sheena
I'm inclined to agree that Bartholomae presents a conflicting message. Honesty is supposedly one of the best tools of the trade in writing, but how honest are we when we deceive an audience? In the end, though, I guess the audience doesn't realize...and hey, the writer does get educated on the topic while writing the paper.
Interesting point, Tara. Is it unethical to ask students to "fake it"? Is "faking it" deceptive?
I guess it depends on whether you believe that a writer has an "authentic," true self that exists outside of discourse.
One of the assumptions of Bartholomae's article seems to be that a writer does not *write,* so much as he is *written by* the discourses in which he participates. In that sense, the self is shaped discursively, in a continual process of becoming.
In this sense, it may not be a matter of being "deceptive" as one of coming into being as a participant in a discourse community--a process which may involve mistakes, miscues, and yes, even fakery.
Good connection to Flower and Hayes. I feel like this is poor advice to give to a student. Yes, if a student is supposed to write for an academic audience he/she should step it up and write accordingly. However, I feel like this will produce superficial papers of students using a thesaraus to include words they don't even understands, and look up complex concepts to reproduce them in their paper without understanding it. Students should gain as much knowledge of their topic as possible before writing their paper so at least they're a "semi-expert" instead of spitting out knowledge. This won't necessarily create good writers, but rather I believe it will create writers who learn to cut corners and take short cuts.
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