Thoughts on Bartholomae by J. Jackson

I must admit, Bartholomae's text feels deep and fascinating to me. His writing on writing was at times difficult to follow due to 17 or so pages of mostly (IMO) winded points, and by the end my mind was a bit clustered. However, I enjoyed the reading immensely because not only did most points make sense, but I was like "yes!" to many of them. I may have this wrong, but it seems like Bartholomae's point is that we must be allowed to imagine for ourselves what it is to be an uppity writer and work out the kinks in action without being made to think we have to invent a new language, have to perform right out of the gate. We should encourage experimentation rather than setting expectations (or letting one assume) of a higher station, whether covert or overt. It gets deep, but its like we don't want to make our students think that they're in one single box, with only one single scary successful route out of the entrapment - which is to stay perfectly inside the four corners of the box- but they have to guess what that box means and discover or create a new unique code to gain permitted and respectable access outside of it. When we pop our head out, we're looking with a scared look on our face to see what the reaction is, but worse, more often than not we get no real idea.

Instead of all that, a better way might be to think of writing with authority as several 'boxes.' Say many boxes are to be presented to the student, allowing them free access in and out of each one, clearance to enter,, to exit, to evaluate whats inside- see it, touch it, feel it, experiment with it, then leave to check out something else if they begin to feel overwhelmed with one box. Each box can be revisited as part of a tour, not a matrix of a single box. Demystification. Start basic, record the process, and build the bridges from there. This can help eliminate student assumptions of teacher expectations, and allow students to explore and build the steps to the top of the mountain with less anxiety. I feel like I'm talking in a riddle worse than Bartholomae now. I think having discussions about writing in a classroom setting is equally as important as the act of writing itself.

A couple times, Bartholomae touched on "acts of appropriation which constitute authority" in writing. Instead of coming up with bullshit, the writer is clear and concise about what they know and don't know, what they assume, or don't , what they experience or lax in experience. There's authority and integrity in honesty. If someone proffers a style of B.S. authority, its going to seep through, and potentially misinform or worse, be spotted as fake, piss-off the reader and detract from the writer's authority, which is disaster. The writer would be better off to lay-out facts, assumptions, experiences, and beliefs honestly in order to reflect the genuine and real persona. When discussing the various writing samples offered and analyzed, Bartholomae writes "The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or perhaps, best begins) when a student can both define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a 'common' discourse, and when he can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the 'common' code but his own." This tells me that the path to good writing, or good writing is perhaps a hybrid we concoct, drawn from several factors and not just one place or the other, assumed or inspired.

I enjoyed Bartholomae's summation of the high school writer's thought process of "trying on the discourse" and writing for an audience he/she could mostly only guess-at - the assumed "impressive air of authority," of which I can connect with well, as I think back. The real and the fake can be spotted.

I love the analysis of the thought processes of the student writers. This seems to touch on a though process of learn and apply, like the anecdote by the basic student writer of figuring out how to build the clay earth model. What is there to consider, what may vary, what can make the clay model unique and be best representative. The clay model of the earth, and the process of going about it may represent, in a way, a similar process we go through as we try to decide how to tackle our writing - the main idea of the student paper being creativity. Even though the student sample of the earth clay model wasn't meant as a comparative to writing (i don't think), I saw it as one because I'm always looking for hidden meaning. Probably nothing in fact.

Notable thoughts from Bartholomae:

A paraphrase of sections of the writer's thought: the text discusses a writer's need to  acknowledge and anticipate readers' assumptions and biases, building bridges between his viewpoint and the theirs, beginning with common points of departure. This sounded a lot like basic technical communication. Begin small, basic and build up slowly so comprehension and understanding can take place. 

Talking about a writer who has lost himself in the discourse of the readers - "entering the discourse without successfully approximating it" when someone feels forced to write about something, and in the early example on page 8 switches from an authoritative-sounding writer to a bullshit-sounding writer; Slipping into a role and voicing that role with believable authority