David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University"

David Bartholomae defines "inventing the University" as a writing process that college students must undertake everytime they craft a new piece. In order to "invent the University," students have to assemble and mimick the language of the specific discourse community that they want to join. In other words, if a college student want to be an effective writer, he/she must learn to speak the language of his/her specific audience. To do this, Bartholomae stresses the importance of building bridges between personal point of view and the reader's. College writers must act like boxing champs- always anticipating the opponent's next move. However, instead of predicting when to block a punch, writers are predicting a response to the metaphorical "punch" of a reader's assumptions and biases.

Bartholomae emphasizes with the fact that it is often difficult for students to take on authoratative roles in their papers because they may not feel like they are qualified to do so. After all, reading a few books does not give someone the confidence of an expert. Bartholomae is very clear when he says that students do not have to be experts, they just have to act like experts. By engaging in this facade, writing students will finally be allowed to immerse themselves in the a new discourse community. This reminds me of the old cliche "if it talks like a duck...and walks like a duck...then it probably is a duck." In other words, acting the part is just as good as being the part. College writers will inevitably become effective writers by acting like effective writers. Effective writers tune out outside influences (like whether or not this is exactly the teacher wants) in favor of the concerns of their discourse communities.

Bartholomae claims that a good place to start this acting process is by starting a commonplace. A commonplace is "a statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration." In other words, this is a technique that will spark the audience's curiosity and thus give the writer an important purpose. As stated by Flower and Hayes, this process allows the writer to create goals. These goals may start independently and privately, but they ultimately become public when others have access to the work. Goals help to make the paper effective because they give the writing a purpose- and hey, everything needs a purpose.

I enjoyed reading this article and I think it came at a very appropriate time. During our discussion with Ian this past Friday, it certainly seemed like a lot of us are struggling with our classroom assignments. We are all eager to become successful tutors and we are finding out that this is not an easy thing to do. As a class, we are experiencing a variety of complications- from difficulties scheduling meetings to having tutees who are ridiculously disinterested in us. However, by perserving on and acting the part of "good tutors", we are still achieving the goal of participating within our discourse community. Even if things aren't going as smoothly as they do on paper, we are responding to different situations and learning from them. In this respect, our struggles have just as much merit as our successes. This is sometimes hard to see- after all, as college students, we can't help but to be concerned with our grades. We want the successes. We are inclined to do what we feel will yield the A or B.

What I've discovered is that this course is not about taking the one perfect path. There is NO such thing as a universal road. We must all find the path that works for us and that's how we achieve the most that we can. I think Ian really helped to clarify this on Friday, leading to a very effective breakthrough. Ironically enough, finding what works best for myself and my tutee- with no concern to what any other pair does, or what any particular theorist says- will help us both the most and thus it will yield the best grade anyway. :) Win-win situation.

Kudos to you, Ian Turner.