David Bartholomae sought to explain the difficulties students had in adjusting to the writing style expected of them in your standard university. This urge led him to write an essay which he named “Inventing the University” In this radical essay he explains in great detail why students seem to have such difficulty in writing university discourse and some practices we could put into the current public school systems that would help alleviate some of the difficulty most college freshmen face. In this essay I will be covering some of the major points he hits upon throughout his essay. Bartholomae starts by explaining the experience of a freshmen first entering college. He says the freshmen must “learn to speak [University] language” (273). The
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He needs to write in a new and inspiring way that the professors deem professional and worthy of being called a college level essay. These very students who have gotten A’s and B’s for turning papers in that are virtually free of grammar issues and original thought or ideas. The writer is walking into a field of land minds. Bartholomae theorizes that the incoming students have not been prepared in the least bit for college style writing. Students in the past have been taught to write in order to pass a test, not to write in order to impress or evoke a mental breakthrough. The skills he needs must start being taught in high school with the teachers expecting more from the student. The standard for writing must be raised. The high school student must be given the authority of a teacher. The student has to write not as a student but as an “outsider” (277). The standard read and respond essay is not good enough anymore. Instead of proving a thesis, that has been proved a million times over for fifty years about some archaic piece of literature, to the teacher he must prove that thesis to a class of students as a teacher. He needs to write as if he is trying to get across a point that will change every readers life, and he needs to write as if he has read the literature backwards and forwards, inside and out, knows every line, every symbol, ever metaphor and every simile. He needs to write as …show more content…
Grand sentences not a single trace of a run on or a fragment. But, these very papers literally put me to sleep. People soon got tired of receiving their papers back with drool stains in addition to the changes I suggest they make. For years now the main focus of the writings in English classes has been primarily teaching how the most important part of an essay is the grammar and the spelling and then we are taught how ever writer that has ever made a name for themselves was considered a radical in the world of English in their time. William Shakespeare added over 1000 words to the English language, so I never saw how it was such a crime for a high school senior to use a word that might not be in the dictionary to his essay as long as it is relevant to the essay and the meaning can be deciphered with ease. I saw people fail when their papers with deep intricate analysis of the subject but the diction and syntax wasn’t formal enough or up to par according to the teacher. I wonder when it was decided that the way a paper was written was more important than the content of the
He needs to write in a new and inspiring way that the professors deem professional and worthy of being called a college level essay. These very students who have gotten A’s and B’s for turning papers in that are virtually free of grammar issues and original thought or ideas. The writer is walking into a field of land minds. Bartholomae theorizes that the incoming students have not been prepared in the least bit for college style writing. Students in the past have been taught to write in order to pass a test, not to write in order to impress or evoke a mental breakthrough. The skills he needs must start being taught in high school with the teachers expecting more from the student. The standard for writing must be raised. The high school student must be given the authority of a teacher. The student has to write not as a student but as an “outsider” (277). The standard read and respond essay is not good enough anymore. Instead of proving a thesis, that has been proved a million times over for fifty years about some archaic piece of literature, to the teacher he must prove that thesis to a class of students as a teacher. He needs to write as if he is trying to get across a point that will change every readers life, and he needs to write as if he has read the literature backwards and forwards, inside and out, knows every line, every symbol, ever metaphor and every simile. He needs to write as …show more content…
Grand sentences not a single trace of a run on or a fragment. But, these very papers literally put me to sleep. People soon got tired of receiving their papers back with drool stains in addition to the changes I suggest they make. For years now the main focus of the writings in English classes has been primarily teaching how the most important part of an essay is the grammar and the spelling and then we are taught how ever writer that has ever made a name for themselves was considered a radical in the world of English in their time. William Shakespeare added over 1000 words to the English language, so I never saw how it was such a crime for a high school senior to use a word that might not be in the dictionary to his essay as long as it is relevant to the essay and the meaning can be deciphered with ease. I saw people fail when their papers with deep intricate analysis of the subject but the diction and syntax wasn’t formal enough or up to par according to the teacher. I wonder when it was decided that the way a paper was written was more important than the content of the