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.
You're a genius! You can write for me any day you want
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ReplyDelete>> 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. <<
ReplyDeleteYou verbalized one of my personal struggles in academic writing. I almost always know what I want to say, but getting it down on paper, in sentences, is the hard part. Browsing through one of my notebooks will reveal pages of pre-writing for just a short three-paragraph response paper. My ideas tend to hit me in phrases, not fully-developed sentences. Hopefully with time, practice, and guidance (in this class), I'll be able to articulate myself more easily as the semester goes on.
When you use a better vocabulary though, if you are thinking of your audience in your terms, then don't you alienate some parts of your audience. If they cant understand you, then they are eliminated. I disagree with the fact that the audience is everyone, unless it is actually everyone, and in a class setting this is impossible because the teacher assigns the grade not the person sitting next to you. So at least i shape my paper in that way. If i was writing for fun or for a journal it would be a different paper because i would have a legit audience but if im in a class im not going to write to the person next to me because i have nothing to gain by doing so where as when im writing to a teacher audience i can mprove my grade. its all basically screwed up because because of the conformity of society and the grading system, which there really isnt a better method because it wouldnt be fiscally possible. so were all jipped kinda.
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