David Bartholomae offers a useful perspective on the challenge of students to write academic essays. Perhaps essay writing is challenging because they must invent the university. He says that 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” (511). Furthermore, students must comfortably “find some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, [and] the history of a discipline” to excel in at the university.
Using several high school student essays, he explores the ways in which the student attempts to invent the university. Generally, he discovers students must dare to speak scholarly in order to answer the imagined expectations of college professors. He is looking for the students ability to reference “commonplaces” which according to him are “controlling ideas of our composition” or “a culturally or instititutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration” (512). For example, a student describing a clay model attempts to use the terminology he presumes is suitable for his topic and for his readers to demonstrate his knowledgability of clay models. Problems arise when the student is caught in a tug-o-war between satisfying what he presumes his audience to know and the degree of authority he may assert as he explains his ideas. As Bartholomae says, the students must “try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes” depending on the task at hand. Students must apply the discourse of a literary critic for one task and on another day the discourse of psychologist in another. How can we expect students to try on different discourses as if they were trying on different outfits for various occasions and expect them to find a strong original voice?
Perhaps, we can devise creative assignment tasks that condition the student to remain consciously aware of their audience. For example, we can ask the students to explain baseball to a Martian or explain the monomyth to a third grader. These creative tasks force the writer to tailor their discourse appropriately for their audience (515). The writer must employ an “imagination in which they consider themselves within the privileged discourse, on that already includes and excludes groups of readers, they must be either equal to or more powerful than those they would address” in order to “transform political and social relationships between basic writing students and their teachers” (516). Although creative assignments offer opportunity for students to improve their writing, it is impossible to eliminate the intimidation a student feels knowing their teachers are the experts on the subject. Bartholomae explains that “students have to assume privilege without having any” in order to speak effectively (516).
There seems to be magic scholarly code and somehow students must live and breathe this code to translate their ideas into acceptable university discourse. They must do this while simultaneous monitoring syntactical construction. According to Barholomae, it is a mistake to classify a writer’s level by number of syntactical errors. It is possible “students who can write reasonably correct narratives may fall to pieces when faced with more unfamiliar assignments” (522). What then can students do acquire this magic scholarly code?
Perhaps imitation is necessary like training wheels. In order to gain familiarity with scholarly discourse, imitation is possibly necessary for the unskilled or basic writer. In the struggle between establishing an authoritive voice and satisfying syntactical standards, Bartholomae seems to prefer papers with a stronger sense of voice than the syntactically coherent essays.
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