Bartholomae Post

431 Blog 2

By Russell Hare

David Bartholomae describes the challenges of engaging in university or college writing. There seems to be an unrealistic expectation of students writing with “authority” in the style of an expert well before they have the knowledge to be experts. However, the feature of Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” that caught my attention was the distinction between basic and advanced writers.

He speaks of the difference between a student being considered a “basic writer” or “advanced writer” according to university placement tests. A writer that may make some grammatical mistakes, but engages in more complex, detail-oriented writing, is more likely to get high scores in university writing placement assessments, which means the institution views these students as more adequately prepared to engage in university level writing. A “basic writer” may address the writing prompt and have no sentence level errors, but there writing is more succinct and does not contain much elaboration on the prompt. Here is a quote that illustrate his point:

 

“From this point of view, the student who wrote about constructing the clay model of the earth is better prepared for his education than the student who wrote about playing football in white shoes, even though the “White Shoes” paper was relatively error-free and the “Clay Model” paper was not. It will be hard to pry the writer of the “White Shoes” paper loose from the tidy, pat discourse that allows him to dispose of the question of creativity in such a quick and efficient manner” (Bartholomae, p.20).

 

For the most part, Bartholomae seems to advocate writers that challenge themselves by implementing complex prose over a conservative writer that seeks to avoid grammatical, sentence level mistakes. Bartholomae states that we should encourage this more complex writing style and that sentence level errors are not the unitary indicator of a student’s writing proficiency.

I agree with Bartholomae in some regards. In order to improve, writers must challenge themselves and take some risks. Being overly self-conscious of grammatical mistakes could ultimately hinder students’ writing development. And writing instructors should encourage some degree of experimentation by not putting too much emphasis on grammar or strictly enforcing a basic essay outline (Intro paragraph, Body 1, Body 2, etc. & Conclusion). However, I think the context in which a student is writing is very important when it comes to which writing approach (complex vs. conservative) should be encouraged and expected. In the contexts of writing composition courses (the context Bartholomae is dealing with) or creative writing, I absolutely agree with fostering a more complex and elegant writing style.

The problem is that a large amount of writing that occurs in the world takes place outside of the context of composition or creative writing classes. For instance, when making an argument for a political science or history class, it can be very beneficial to have a clear, efficient writing style that gets straight to the point and does not have many sentence level grammatical errors. I imagine the same would be true of a science class. So my main disagreement is that Bartholomae uses terms like “basic writer” and “advanced writer” when he should be saying “basic English Composition Writer” or “Advanced English Composition Writer” because some of the “basic writings” in his piece could serve some students extremely well in other fields. Also, out of incoming freshmen students, the majority will spend their college years writing in a field outside of English composition and their clear, succinct writing, which contains few sentence level errors can serve them well. I wouldn’t want to convince students that clear and succinct, even if it is boring and lacks poetic grace, is inferior writing while complex (and sometimes convoluted) writing is superior. In general, neither of the two styles is inferior or superior; it’s just that one style may be more appropriate in a certain context.