Inventing the University. Chapter written by David Bartholomae in text “Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader”. Ed. Victor Villanueva. 2nd Edition. National Council of Teachers of English: 2003.
This piece by Bartholomae reminds me of the Amy Tan piece Mothertongue, where Tan evaluates the foolishness of assuming that she needed to change the way she wrote English because of her audience, to seem smart enough or something equally vague and nonsensical. At the same time, I recognize that we use many different registers when speaking and writing. I am obviously not going to talk colloquial Spanglish slang at, say, a job interview. And neither am I going to talk about antidisestablishmentarianism to fourth graders. (and no, I don’t know anything about that hideously long word other than it is the longest word in the English dictionary – Mary Poppins doesn’t count) The way I talk to my students cannot reflect the way I talk to my kitten (who is insanely adorable and makes me go into paroxysms of ‘Who’s Mama’s good girl, you’re so cuuuute!!’)
She looks Russian, doesn't she? Hence, the name.
**Squeee!!**
Ahem! Yeah, so . . .
In selecting the appropriate discourse, the correct tone and register we use in any given situation, we come face to face with another hurdle for writers: the matter of audience. There is much debate on the subject of audience, as reported by classmate Jeniffer. Some theorists claim that audience is important to a writer, should guide the writer into creating a piece that is important. And yet other theorists suggest that audience shouldn’t matter, that in thinking of writing for an audience creates a barrier between the writer and the finished product, that a piece of writing created for an audience is not truly authentic. Both sides matter, of course. One cannot write everything the same manner, just as one cannot simply produce a piece based solely on audience, losing individuality.
The key is a balance between audience and individuality, between empathy for the reader and honesty with the self. I think this only gets better with practice, and with interest in part of the writer.
Bartholomae states in page 628 that “the writer who can successfully manipulate and audience (or, to use a less pointed language, the writer who can accomodate her motives to her reader’s expectations) is a writer who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege.” Simply put, a writer who understand who the audience is, who can use this knowledge, is one who can push the audience’s buttons.
Teaching the section I currently teach at RUM, this semester I encountered freshman students at the University, students whose experience in writing essays has been either very personal and casual, or the exact opposite, very formal and functional. I encountered students who were so used to having a question, a specific set of guidelines to define audience for them, to aid their writing, that when I gave them a free-topic essay, they essentially freaked out. They had no idea how to work in defining their purpose, in constructing their conception of audience.
I tried to get them to think fo themselves first, to figure out who they were as writers before considering audience. Their frst papers were very casual, individual, with contractions, abbreviations, slang words. Then I tried to get them to write for an academic audience, citing texts and providing sources, refining their language.
As happened to Richard Raymond in my previous entry, I have had some failures with some students who see writing as something formulaic, as a means to an end and nothing else. But I harbor the hope that for the majority of the students this semester, that they see that they do not need to trade in their originality to connect to an audience, and that they do not have to settle for writing formulaic, safe papers that only satisfy the audience but are regrettably forgettable to them.
