Bartholomae Reading Response

Summary

Bartholomae, in his article “Must We Mean What We Say?,” strives to explain to fellow educators that students must play with authorial identity and tone in their writing if they are going to write anything worth writing. Having taught freshman composition for many years, he identifies a lack in student writing that he proposes can be solved; he wants teachers to ask their students to reevaluate how they identify (in terms of themselves as well as other writers) in their writing.

 

Synthesis

Bartholomae’s insistence on considering other writers’ works as a tool in furthering one’s own writing is reminiscent of Greene’s framing technique. Bartholomae’s explanation of why he gave his students a review of a poem, “I was teaching my students how to work with sources, how to have an idea in response to someone else’s ideas, how to get a word in edgewise” (22) reminds me of Kantz’s essay in which she talks of how we can help students read rhetorically to find their original argument within an academic conversation, their niche.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

2) I change my writing all the time, depending on my genre and audience. If I am composing an email to a student, I have to be helpful and professional, and above all, succinct. If I am writing an academic paper for a particular professor I will alter my writing style and voice to coincide with that reader’s wishes and expectations. If I am posting something on Facebook I try to be pithy and appeal to a large demographic of friends and peers.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

1)      The student can get more than one persona on the page because she is, as Bartholomae points out “double voiced” (19). She recognizes the different identifies she needs to convey in her paper and changes her authorial tone to suit the situation. I think by revising my work and looking at my writing through the work of other writers (as Bartholomae suggests) I can change my tone to fit my needs.

3) I think Bartholomae is trying to question the construct of always “being ourselves” when we write, or, alternatively, of writing ourselves out of the paper with pure objectivity. He says that we indeed do not always need to “mean what we say” and encourages playing with authorial voice in our writing.

 

Meta Moment

I think the advice given by Appiah is something I have always striven to achieve in my writing. In some of my early attempts at academic writing I could not help but insert some of my own wit alongside my studied academic tone. Though sometimes the duality of tone is, I believe, unsupported in some classrooms, it something I would nevertheless wish to cultivate in my future endeavors. I like Bartholomae’s notion of using the voices of other writers to revise one’s own writing. It is a tool I would like to utilize in future projects.

 

Personal Thoughts

Bartholomae’s article was one of the most engaging ones I’ve read for the course to date. His writing style is very different; he has some adventurous forays with grammar that I enjoy. He chooses not to explain some of the off-hand comments he makes, but he praises a student who does the same, so that makes me think this is a deliberate choice made on his part. His ideas are deep without being unapproachable.