"The Achievment of Desire"

Richard Rodrigues battled the life of being a Spanish-speaking American in a lower-income family, whose parent's never truly got a great education. His adolescence is masked by books and the desire to learn, and his family ties are thus "broken".

I think it is interesting to see that Rodrigues realized how much of his life he "missed" because of his devotness to learning. I think whats most compelling is that its not just that he was determined to learn, he was determined to be better than his parents. In some ways, he was right in wanting to succeed in life, and do more than just basic educaton and factory jobs. I think he was misguided not by the passion of learning, but from the intensity and insanity that he developed from it. In a way, I think Rodrigues alienated himself from the rest of his life in order to achieve a goal that he hadn't quite figured out until the very end of his "education". It is almost sad to know that the whole time he was learning and alienating himself, he would come back years from then, realizing everything he had done was only to bring him back to his family. Its not sad that family was the "end-all" for him, but that he had dissociated himself from them for so many years. 

I think that this essay describes how education can change us all, and in a way, we lose a little of ourselves inorder to obtain something from someone else. Its just up to us to determine how much we want to give up, perhaps?

Inventing the University

David Bartholomae speaks of students discovering their audience and how to communicate with that audience in his essay, "Inventing the University". He also makes a point that students learn to develop their writing from basic to great, and he does this by stating "...sentences fall apart not because the writer lacks the necessary syntax to glue the pieces together but because he lacks the full statement within which these key words are already operating" (Bartholomae 523).


I think that this sentence says a lot about all of us as writers. I think the biggest struggle sometimes is not what to say as much as it is how to say what we are trying to write. Bartholomae continues this idea about the author of the "Clay Model" essay by stating "While writing, and in the thrust of his need to complete the sentence, he has the key words but not the utterance" (523). Again, Bartholomae reiterates the fact that we sometimes have all the right words and ideas, but we can't always put them on paper in a way that appeals to our readers, let alone in a way that makes sense or describes what we are trying to say. I think its important to realize that we can repeat ourselves over and over when one complete sentence can deliver an idea. I think its just a matter of whether or not we have learned to write in such a complex way.


Another idea is that sometimes our vocabulary is so basic that it doesn't deliver the message we are trying to get across. Bartholomae excersizes this idea when we explains how a student needs to learn the discourse of the setting, by "learning [our] language" (511). It's like he wants us to be able to write like English professors, which is who we all initially believe is the sole audience of our writing.  In reality, we're writing to each other, but we forget that we still need to write in a way that delivers our message, and that usually includes writing in a way that sounds like we're writing to a higher power than ourselves (aka a teacher). 


Going from a "good" writer to a "great" writer is just figuring out how to deliver a message in our writing. As my aunt Lauren told me (who was a former high school English teacher), "you wouldn't use the words "cool" to describe a meteor shower, you'd use "scintillating" to be explicit in your description." Just using a more complex word already gives the reader a greater understand of how amazing the meteor shower actually was. I think its important to understand that what seperates us from "good" to "great" is how we deliver the message.

"A Kind Word for Academic Bullshit: The Problem of Academmic Writing" Blog #1

In Philip Eubanks' and John D. Schaeffer's essay, "A Kind Word for Academic Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing", there is a focus on bullshit and what it means and portrays about the bullshitter. I chose this segment of the essay about sales representatives, as it raised two questions for me: "Is their sales pitch bullshit if they sincerely believe that their product really is what's best for their customers? Or does their biased position render them bullshitters no matter what their beliefs are?" (p. 387)

Here, there are two questions raised: Is it bullshit if they believe what they are saying? Or, due to their knowledge of the product, could they be considered liars instead of bullshitters?

I have to argue that if their sales pitch mimics their beliefs regarding the quality of a product, that this is in no case bullshit. Although it may not be to the expectations of the client, the sales representative did give his or her direct thoughts and feelings about a specific product that worked to their liking. One cannot render this bullshit, as it is a complete and true fact regarding the experience and attitudes of a single person. If a customer were to purchase this product and find out he or she is unsatisfied with their purchase, they might be able to consider the product "bullshit", but I think that to consider the sales representative's speech "bullshit" would be improper. The sales rep could have given an honest pledge about his or her positive review of the product they are selling. With this being said, a new question is raised: Is the sales representative just bullshitting his knowledge about a product, or is he lying about his knowledge of his product just to make a sale?

This brings me to my second question: Aren't sales representatives liars rather than bullshitters if they knowingly persuade a customer into buying a product that they themselves render as useless or merely a piece of garbage? Eubanks and Schaeffer describe the sales rep as a bullshitter in this instance. However, according to Franfurt, a liar "believes that the statement is false and intends by making it to deceive" (On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt, p. 8). In Franfurts eyes, the sales representative would be a liar, not a bullshitter. I feel that in this sense, the sales representative would indeed be a liar rather than a bullshitter, and his own speech is also not bullshit, but a lie.

I think this reading brought up two very interesting questions about the difference between bullshitting and lying. I think we have all had a similar occurence in our lives, and not necessarily with a sales representative, but from tv sports stars, actors and actresses, and even our own parents (we all know they didn't really have to walk to school 10 miles up hill and bare foot). We are confronted with what might be rendered as a bullshit speech, or it could just be another lie. I guess in some regards, we'll honestly never know if it was just bullshit, or if it was said to honestly deceive us.