David Bartholomae
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“Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion-invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English”(Bartholomae). This is the beginning of Bartholomae’s article and the beginning of students’ lives as writers. This article is really important for me because it helps us understand how difficult is to teach a student how to write. They do this by giving some examples of university students’ essays and an analysis of those essays. This article confronted me with my own reality as an academic writer. It made me reflect about the things I need to keep improving if I want to be a writing teacher. This article too is good because it give students some guidelines to follow in order to become academic writers. An academic writer is one who knows how to appropriate a specialized discourse to communicate his or her ideas to any kind of audience. He or she has to be a specialist on what he or she is going to write about. Whereas this is complicated or not for me as a graduate student, I have to keep in mind that this is what I want my students to do when they have to write. By consequence, writing is not the act of using words and putting them together using the correct syntax or using the correct grammar, but it is much more than that. Writing is: studying first the information you want to write about, have a great understanding of the meaning of that information, and then knowing how to communicate effectively that information. This implicates that one can not call himself a writer if I he is not a literate person. I use the term literate to describe an avid reader, a person who likes to cultivate her intellect to be able to have great knowledge. I make reference to reading because in the article the connection between reading and writing is shown. What we read will determine in some way how we are going to write. Once we are exposed to some kind of readings, our writing will be affected by these readings. “A writer does not write but is, himself, written by the languages available to him” (this is Bartholomae’s famous paradox). I believe this paradox is what best shows the connection between reading and writing. It also shows that good writing is not only the act of invention of discovery, but the act of learning a style, “the academic style”.
