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rachitkalal8 asked for the first time
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punithg05 and 1 tagged contributor answered this question
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punithg05 answered this question
in Accounting·
4 Mar 2024

Lui, Montavo, and Johnson plan to liquidate their Premium Pool and Spa business. They have always shared profit and losses in a 1:4:5 ratio, and on the day of the liquidation their balance sheet appeared as follows:
 

Premium Pool and Spa
Balance Sheet
June 30, 2023 Assets             Cash       $ 76,250   Machinery $ 610,750         Less: Accumulated depreciation   148,000     462,750   Total assets       $ 539,000   Liabilities             Accounts payable       $ 146,000   Equity             Jim Lui $ 77,400         Kent Montavo, capital   202,000         Dave Johnson, capital   113,600         Total equity         393,000   Total liabilities and equity       $ 539,000  


Required:
1.
Under the assumption that the machinery is sold and the cash is distributed to the proper parties on June 30, 2023, complete the schedule provided below. Show the sale, the gain or loss allocation, and the distribution of the cash in each of the following unrelated cases:

a. The machinery is sold for $510,000. (Negative answers should be indicated by a minus sign.)



b. The machinery is sold for $397,000. (Negative answers should be indicated by a minus sign.)



c. The machinery is sold for $202,000, and any partners with resulting deficits can and do pay in the amount of their deficits. (Negative answers should be indicated by a minus sign.)



d. The machinery is sold for $209,000, and the partners have no assets other than those invested in the business. (Negative answers should be indicated by a minus sign.)




2. Prepare the entry to record the final distribution of cash assuming the machinery is sold for $510,000.

 

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esaiyarasan06 asked for the first time
in English·
3 Mar 2024

I want you to write an formal essay outline  arguing for the proper way for College faculty members to teach writing in the classroom.

Instructions: Provide a brief 200–300 word synopsis of your formal essay. Kindly be sure you include the following: 1. Your essay's title. 2. Direct quotes from Murray, Bartholomae, or Wardle that you want to use (at least one each paragraph, five paragraphs = five quotes). Don't forget to cite at least two of these references. There is no requirement to use any outside resources. Pay attention to the readings that are discussed and used in class. 3. The thesis statement. 4. When required, finish sentences. 5. Turn in the assignment as a Microsoft Word file.

 

This is not the place for you to vent or level accusations at professors; instead, it should be used to start a discussion about what college writing entails and how best faculty can assist students in making the transition to college-level writing.  In order to complete the Formal Essay, you must cite a us as an example a minimum of two items from our reading below:

1) Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product

by DONALD M. MURRAY

Most of us are trained as English teachers by studying a product: writing.

Our critical skills are honed by examining literature, which is finished writ-ing; language as it has been used by authors. And then, fully trained in the autopsy, we go out and are assigned to teach our students to write, to make language live.

Naturally we try to use our training. It's an investment and so we teach writing as a product, tocusing our critical attentions on what our students have done, as if they had passed literature in to us. It isn't literature, of course, and we use our skills, with which we can dissect and sometimes almost destroy Shakespeare or Robert Lowell to prove it.

Our students knew it wasn't literature when they passed it in, and our attack usually does little more than confirm their lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves; we are as frustrated as our students, for conscien-tious, doggedly responsible, repetitive autopsying doesn't give birth to live writing. The product doesn't improve, and so, blaming the student —who else? — we pass him along to the next teacher, who is trained, too often, the same way we were. Year after year the student shudders under a barrage of criticism, much of it brilliant, some of it stupid, and all of it irrelevant. No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process.

And once you can look at your composition program with the realization you are teaching a process, you may be able to design a curriculum

'which works. Not overnight, for writing is a demanding, intellectual process;

but sooner than you think, for the process can be put to work to produce a product which may be worth your reading.

What is the process we should teach? It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world.

Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writ-ing, and glory in its unfinishedness. We work with language in action. We share with our students the continual excitement of choosing one word instead of another, of searching for the one true word.

This is not a question of correct or incorrect, of etiquette or custom.

This is a matter of far higher importance. The writer, as he writes, is making ethical decisions. He doesn't test his words by a rule book, but by life. He uses language to reveal the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others. It is an exciting, eventful, evolving process.

This process of discovery through language we call writing can be introduced to your classroom as soon as you have a very simple understanding of that process, and as soon as you accept the full implications of teaching process, not product.

The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. The amount of time a writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, his maturity as a craftsman, and the challenge of what he is trying to say. It is not a rigid lock-step process, but most writers most of the time pass through these three stages.

Prewriting is everything that takes place before the first draft. Prewriting usually takes about 85% of the writer's time. It includes the awareness of his world from which his subject is born. In prewriting, the writer focuses on that subject, spots an audience, chooses a form which may carry his subject to his audience. Prewriting may include research and daydreaming, note-making and outlining, title-writing and lead-writing

Writing is the act of producing a hrst draft. It is the fastest part of the process, and the most frightening, for it is a commitment. When you complete a draft you know how much, and how little, you know. And the writing of this first draft-rough, searching, unfinished — may take as little as one percent of the writer's time.

Rewriting is reconsideration of subject, form, and audience. It is re-searching, rethinking, redesigning, rewriting— and finally, line-by-line edit-ing, the demanding, satisfying process of making each word right. It may take many times the hours required for a first draft, perhaps the remaining fourteen percent of the time the writer spends on the project.

How do you motivate your student to pass through this process, perhaps even pass through it again and again on the same piece of writing?

First by shutting up. When you are talking he isn't writing. And you don't learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it. Next by placing the opportunity for discovery in your student's hands. When you give him an assignment you tell him what to say and how to say it, and thereby cheat your student of the opportunity to learn the process of discovery we call writing.

To be a teacher of a process such as this takes qualities too few of us have, but which most of us can develop. We have to be quiet, to listen, to re-spond. We are not the initiator or the motivator; we are the reader, the recipient.

We have to be patient and wait, and wait, and wait. The suspense in the beginning of a writing course is agonizing for the teacher, but if we break first, if we do the prewriting for our students they will not learn the largest part of the writing process.

We have to respect the student, not for his product, not for the paper we call literature by giving it a grade, but for the search for truth in which he is engaged. We must listen carefully for those words that may reveal a truth, that may reveal a voice. We must respect our student for his potential truth and for his potential voice. We are coaches, encouragers, developers, creators of environments in which our students can experience the writing process for themselves.

Let us see what some of the implications of teaching process, not prod-uct, are for the composition curriculum.

Implication No. 1. The text of the writing course is the student's own writing. Students examine their own evolving writing and that of their class-mates, so that they study writing while it is still a matter of choice, word by

Implication No. 2. The student finds his own subject. It is not the job of the teacher to legislate the student's truth. It is the responsibility of the student to explore his own world with his own language, to discover his own meaning. The teacher supports but does not direct this expedition to the student's own truth.

Implication No. 3. The student uses his own language. Too often, as writer and teacher Thomas Williams points out, we teach English to our stu-

willing to exploit that language if they are allowed to embark on a serious search for their own truth.

Implication No. 4. The student should have the opportunity to write all the drafts necessary for him to discover what he has to say on this particular

subject. Each new draft, of course, is counted as equal to a new paper. You are not teaching a product, you are teaching a process.

Implication No. 5. The student is encouraged to attempt any form of writing which may help him discover and communicate what he has to say.

The process which produces "creative" and "functional" writing is the same.

You are not teaching products such as business letters and poetry, narrative and exposition. You are teaching a product your students can use — now and in the future-to produce whatever product his subject and his audience demand.

Implication No. 6. Mechanics come last. It is important to the writer, once he has discovered what he has to say, that nothing get between him and his reader. He must break only those traditions of written communication which would obscure his meaning.

Implication No. 7. There must be time for the writing process to take place and time for it to end. The writer must work within the stimulating tension of unpressured time to think and dream and stare out windows, and pressured time — the deadline - to which the writer must deliver.

Implication No. 8. Papers are examined to see what other choices the writer might make. The primary responsibility for seeing the choices is the student. He is learning a process. His papers are always unfinished, evolving, until the end of the marking period. A grade finishes a paper, the way publication usually does. The student writer is not graded on drafts any more than a concert pianist is judged on his practice sessions rather than on his performance. The student writer is graded on what he has produced at the end of the writing process.

Implication No. 9. The students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way, some fast, some slow, whatever it takes for them, within the limits of the course deadlines, to find their own way to their own truth.

Implication No. 10. There are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives.

What works one time may not another. All writing is experimental.

None of these implications require a special schedule, exotic training, extensive new materials or gadgetry, new classrooms, or an increase in fed-eral, state, or local funds. They do not even require a reduced teaching load.

What they do require is a teacher who will respect and respond to his stu-dents, not for what they have done, but for what they may do; not for what they have produced, but for what they may produce, if they are given an opportunity to see writing as a process, not a product.

2) Intertextuality and the Discourse Community by James porter 
At the conclusion of Eco's The Name of the Rose, the monk Adso of Melk 
returns to the burned abbey, where he finds in the ruins scraps of parchment, the 
only remnants from one of the great libraries in all Christendom. He spends a 
day collecting the charred fragments, hoping to discover some meaning in the 
scattered pieces of books. He assembles his own "lesser library .. . of 
fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books" 
(500). To Adso, these random shards are "an immense acrostic that says and 
repeats nothing" (501). Yet they are significant to him as an attempt to order 
experience. 
We might well derive our own order from this scene. We might see Adso as 
representing the writer, and his desperate activity at the burned abbey as a mod- 
el for the writing process. The writer in this image is a collector of fragments, an
archaeologist creating an order, building a framework, from remnants of the 
past. Insofar as the collected fragments help Adso recall other, lost texts, his 
experience affirms a principle he learned from his master, William of Basker- 
ville: "Not infrequently books speak of books" (286). Not infrequently, and 
perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for 
their meaning. All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar 
as we understand its precursors. 
This is the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that all writing 
and speech-indeed, all signs-arise from a single network: what Vygotsky 
called "the web of meaning"; what poststructuralists label Text or Writing 
(Barthes, ecriture); and what a more distant age perhaps knew as logos. Exam- 
ining texts "intertextually" means looking for "traces," the bits and pieces of 
Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new dis- 
course. ' The most mundane manifestationf intertextuality is explicit citation, 
but intertextuality animates all discourse and goes beyond mere citation. For the 
intertextual critics, Intertext is Text-a great seamless textual fabric. And, as 
they like to intone solemnly, no text escapes intertext. 
Intertextuality provides rhetoric with an important perspective, one currently 
neglected, I believe. The prevailing composition pedagogies by and large culti- 
vate the romantic image of writer as free, uninhibited spirit, as independent, 
creative genius. By identifying and stressing the intertextual nature of dis- 
course, however, we shift our attention away from the writer as individual and focus more on the sources and social contexts from which the writer's discourse 
arises. According to this view, authorial intention isless significant than social 
context; the writer is simply apart of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, 
and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective 
meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing. 
My aim here is to demonstratehe significance of this theory to rhetoric, by 
explaining intertextuality, its connection to the notion of "discourse communi- 
ty," and its pedagogical implications for composition. 
The Presence of Intertext 
Intertextuality has been associated with both structuralism and poststruc- 
turalism, with theorists like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, 
Hayden White, Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault, and Michael Riffaterre. (Of 
course, the theory is most often applied in literary analysis.) The central as- 
sumption of these critics has been described by Vincent Leitch: "The text is not 
an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. Its 
system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and 
pieces-traces--of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army 
Outlet with unaccountable collections of incompatible ideas, beliefs, and 
sources" (59). It is these "unaccountable collections" that intertextual critics 
focus on, not the text as autonomous entity. In fact, these critics have redefined 
the notion of "text": Text is intertext, or simply Text. The traditional notion of 
the text as the single work of a given author, and even the very notions of author 
and reader, are regarded as simply convenient fictions for domesticating dis- 
course. The old borders that we used to rope off discourse, proclaim these 
critics, are no longer useful. 
We can distinguish between two types of intertextuality: iterability and 
presupposition. Iterability refers to the "repeatability" of certain textual 
fragments, tocitation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions, 
references, and quotations within adiscourse, but also unannounced sources 
and influences, cliches, phrases in the air, and traditions. That is to say, every 
discourse is composed of "traces," pieces of other texts that help constitute its 
meaning. (I will discuss this aspect of intertextuality in my analysis of the Dec- 
laration of Independence.) Presupposition refers to assumptions a text makes 
about its referent, its readers, and its context-to portions of the text which are 
read, but which are not explicitly "there." For example, as Jonathan Culler 
discusses, the phrase "John married Fred's sister" is an assertion that logically 
presupposes that John exists, that Fred exists, and that Fred has a sister. "Open 
the door" contains apractical presupposition, assuming the presence of a de- 
coder who is capable of being addressed and who is better able to open the door  than the encoder. "Once upon a time" is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition, 
signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of a fictional narrative. Texts 
not only refer to but in fact contain other texts.2 
An examination of three sample texts will illustrate the various facets of 
intertextuality. The first, the Declaration of Independence, ispopularly viewed 
as the work of Thomas Jefferson. Yet if we examine the text closely in its rhetori- 
cal milieu, we see that Jefferson was author only in the very loosest of senses. A 
number of historians and at least two composition researchers (Kinneavy, Theo- 
ry 393-49; Maimon, Readings 6-32) have analyzed the Declaration, with inter- 
esting results. Their work suggests that Jefferson was by no means an origi- 
nal framer or a creative genius, as some like to suppose. Jefferson was a skilled 
writer, to be sure, but chiefly because he was an effective borrower of traces. 
To produce his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson seems to have 
borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from his culture's Text. Much 
has been made of Jefferson's reliance on Locke's social contract theory 
(Becker). Locke's theory influenced colonial political philosophy, emerging in 
various pamphlets and newspaper articles of the times, and served as the foun- 
dation for the opening section of the Declaration. The Declaration contains 
many traces that can be found in other, earlier documents. There are traces from 
a First Continental Congress resolution, a Massachusetts Council declaration, 
George Mason's "Declaration of Rights for Virginia," apolitical pamphlet of 
James Otis, and a variety of other sources, including a colonial play. The over- 
all form of the Declaration (theoretical argument followed by list of grievances) 
strongly resembles, ironically, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which 
Parliament lists the abuses of James II and declares new powers for itself. Sev- 
eral of the abuses in the Declaration seem to have been taken, more or less 
verbatim, from aPennsylvania Evening Post article. And the most memorable 
phrases in the Declaration seem to be least Jefferson's: "That all men are created 
equal" is a sentiment from Euripides which Jefferson copied in his literary com- 
monplace book as a boy; "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" was a 
cliche of the times, appearing in numerous political documents (Dumbauld). 
Though Jefferson's draft of the Declaration can hardly be considered his in 
any exclusive sense of authorship, the document underwent sill more expropri- 
ation at the hands of Congress, who made eighty-six changes (Kinneavy, Theo- 
ry 438). They cut the draft from 21 1 lines to 147. They did considerable editing 
to temper what they saw as Jefferson's emotional style: For example, 
Jefferson's phrase "sacred & undeniable" was changed to the more restrained 
"self-evident." Congress excised controversial passages, such as Jefferson's 
condemnation of slavery. Thus, we should find it instructive to note, Jefferson's 
few attempts at original expression were those least acceptable to Congress. If Jefferson submitted the Declaration for a college writing class as his own 
writing, he might well be charged with plagiarism.3 The idea of Jefferson as 
author is but convenient shorthand. Actually, the Declaration arose out of a 
cultural and rhetorical milieu, was composed of traces and was, in effect, 
team written. Jefferson deserves credit for bringing disparate traces together, 
for helping to mold and articulate the milieu, for creating the all-important 
draft. Jefferson's skill as a writer was his ability to borrow traces effectively and 
to find appropriate contexts for them. As Michael Halliday says, 
"[C]reativeness does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a 
sentence is a quite unimportant and unascertainable property and 'creativi- 
ty' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the 
potentiality oflanguage for the indefinite extension of its resources to new con- 
texts of situation. . . . Our most 'creative' acts may be precisely among those 
that are realized throughighly repetitive forms of behaviour" (Explorations 
42). The creative writer is the creative borrower, in other words. 
Intertextuality can be seen working similarly in contemporary forums. Re- 
call this scene from a recent Pepsi commercial: A young boy in jeans jacket, 
accompanied by dog, stands in some desolate plains crossroads next to a gas 
station, next to which is a soft drink machine. An alien spacecraft, resembling 
the one in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, appears overhead. 
To the boy's joyful amazement, the spaceship hovers over the vending machine 
and begins sucking Pepsi cans into the ship. It takes only Pepsi's, then eventual- 
ly takes the entire machine. The ad closes with a graphic: "Pepsi. The Choice of 
a New Generation." 
Clearly, the commercial presupposes familiarity with Spielberg's movie or, 
at least, with his pacific vision of alien spacecraft. We see several American 
cliches, well-worn signs from the Depression era: the desolate plains, the gen- 
eral store, the pop machine, the country boy with dog. These distinctively 
American traces are juxtaposed against images from science fiction and the 
sixties catchphrase "new generation" in the coda. In this array of signs, we have 
tradition and counter-tradition harmonized. Pepsi squeezes itself in the middle, 
and thus becomes the great American conciliator. The ad's use of irony may 
serve to distract viewers momentarily from noticing how Pepsi achieves its 
purpose by assigning itself an exalted role through use of the intertext. 
We find an interesting example of practical presupposition iJohn Kifner's 
New York Times headline article reporting on the Kent State incident of 1970: 
Four students at Kent State University, two of them women, 
were shot to death this afternoon by a volley of National Guard 
gunfire. At least 8 other students were wounded. The burst of gunfire came about 20 minutes after the guardsmen 
broke up a noon rally on the Commons, agrassy campus gathering 
spot, by lobbing tear gas at a crowd of about 1,000 young people. 
From one perspective, the phrase "two of them women" is a simple statement 
of fact; however, it presupposes acertain attitude-thathe event, horrible 
enough as it was, is more significant because two of the persons killed were 
women. It might be going too far to say that the phrase presupposes a sexist 
attitude ("women aren't supposed to be killed in battles"), but can we imagine 
the phrase "two of them men" in this context? Though equally factual, this 
wording would have been considered odd in 1970 (and probably today as well) 
because it presupposes a cultural mindset alien from the one dominant at the 
time. "Two of them women" is shocking (and hence it was reported) because it 
upsets the sense of order of the readers, in this case the American public. 
Additionally (and more than a little ironically), the text contains anumber of 
traces which have the effect of blunting the shock of the event. Notice that the 
students were not shot by National Guardsmen, but were shot "by a volley of 
. . . gunfire"; the tear gas was "lobbed"; and the event occurred at a "grassy 
campus gathering spot." "Volley" and "lobbed" are military terms, but with 
connections to sport as well; "grassy campus gathering spot" suggests apicnic; 
"burst" can recall the gloriousight of bombs "bursting" in "The Star-Spangled 
Banner." This pastiche of signs casts the text into a certain context, making it 
distinctively American. We might say that the turbulent milieu of the sixties 
provided a distinctive array of signs from which John Kifner borrowed to 
produce his article. 
Each of the three texts examined contains phrases or images familiar to its 
audience or presupposes certain audience attitudes. Thus the intertext exerts its 
influence partly in the form of audience expectation. We mighthen say that the 
audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer. 
That, in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse. 
The Power of Discourse Community 
And, indeed, this is what some poststructuralist critics suggest, those who 
prefer a broader conception of intertext or who look beyond the intertext tothe 
social framework regulating textual production: to what Michel Foucault calls 
"the discursive formation," what Stanley Fish calls "the interpretive communi- 
ty," and what Patricia Bizzell calls "the discourse community." 
A "discourse community" isa group of individuals bound by a common 
interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated. An individual may belong to several professional, public, or person- 
al discourse communities. Examples would include the community of 
engineers whose research area is fluid mechanics; alumni of the University of 
Michigan; Magnavox employees; the members of the Porter family; and 
members of the Indiana Teachers of Writing. The approved channels we can 
call "forums." Each forum has a distinct history and rules governing appropri- 
ateness to which members are obliged to adhere. These rules may be more or 
less apparent, more or less institutionalized, more or less specific to each com- 
munity. Examples of forums include professional publications like Rhetoric 
Review, English Journal, and Creative Computing; public media like 
Newsweek and Runner's World; professional conferences (the annual meeting 
of fluid power engineers, the 4C's); company board meetings; family dinner 
tables; and the monthly meeting of the Indiana chapter of the Izaak Walton 
League. 
A discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropri- 
ate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on 
those objects, what constitutes "evidence" and "validity," and what formal con- 
ventions are followed. A discourse community may have a well-established 
ethos; or it may have competing factions and indefinite boundaries. It may be in 
a "pre-paradigm" state (Kuhn), that is, having an ill-defined regulating system 
and no clear leadership. Some discourse communities are firmly established, 
such as the scientific community, the medical profession, and the justice sys- 
tem, to cite a few from Foucault's list. In these discourse communities, as 
Leitch says, "a speaker must be 'qualified' to talk; he has to belong to a commu- 
nity of scholarship; and he is required to possess a prescribed body of knowl- 
edge (doctrine). . . . [This system] operates to constrain discourse; it 
establishes limits and regularities. . . . who may speak, what may be spoken, 
and how it is to be said; in addition [rules] prescribe what is true and false, what 
is reasonable and what foolish, and what is meant and what not. Finally, they 
work to deny the material existence of discourse itself' (145). 
A text is "acceptable" within a forum only insofar as it reflects the communi- 
ty episteme (to use Foucault's term). On a simple level, this means that for a 
manuscript to be accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 
it must follow certain formatting conventions: Itmust have the expected social 
science sections (i.e., review of literature, methods, results, discussion), and it 
must use the journal's version of APA documentation. However, these are only 
superficial features of the forum. On a more essentialevel, the manuscript 
must reveal certain characteristics, have an ethos (in the broadest possible 
sense) conforming tothe standards of the discourse community: It must demon- 
strate (or at least claim) that it contributes knowledge to the field, it must demonstrate familiarity with the work of previous researchers in the field, it must 
use a scientific method in analyzing its results (showing acceptance of the truth- 
value of statistical demonstration), it must meet standards for test design and 
analysis of results, it must adhere to standards determining degree of accuracy. 
The expectations, conventions, and attitudes of this discourse community-the 
readers, writers, and publishers of Journal of Applied Psychology-will influ- 
ence aspiring psychology researchers, shaping not only how they write but also 
their character within that discourse community. 
The poststructuralist view challenges the classical assumption that writing is
a simple linear, one-way movement: The writer creates a text which produces 
some change in an audience. A poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audi- 
ence (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual 
production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer. 
This view is of course open to criticism for its apparent determinism, for 
devaluing the contributionf individual writers and making them appear mere- 
ly tools of the discourse community (charges which Foucault answers in "Dis- 
course on Language"). If these regulating systems are so constraining, how can 
an individual merge? What happens to the idea of the lone inspired writer and 
the sacred autonomous text? 
Both notions take a pretty hard knock. Genuine originality is difficult within 
the confines of a well-regulated system. Genius is possible, but it may be con- 
strained. Foucault cites the example of Gregor Mendel, whose work in the 
nineteenth century was excluded from the prevailing community of biologists 
because he "spoke of objects, employed methods and placed himself within a
theoretical perspective totally alien to the biology of his time. . . . Mendel 
spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the true)" (224). Frank 
Lentricchia cites a similar example from the literary community: Robert Frost 
"achieved magazine publication only five times between 1895 and 1912, a peri- 
od during which he wrote a number of poems later acclaimed .. . [because] in 
order to write within the dominant sense of the poetic in the United States in the 
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, one 
had to employ a diction, syntax, and prosody heavily favoring Shelley and 
Tennyson. One also had to assume a certain stance, a certain world-weary 
idealism which took care not to refer too concretely to the world of which one 
was weary" (197, 199). 
Both examples point to the exclusionary power of discourse communities 
and raise serious questions about the freedom of the writer: chiefly, does the 
writer have any? Is any writer doomed to plagiarism? Can any text be said to be 
new? Are creativity and genius actually possible? Was Jefferson a creative gen- 
ius or a blatant plagiarist?  Certainly we want to avoid both extremes. Even if the writer is locked into a 
cultural matrix and is constrained by the intertext of the discourse community, 
the writer has freedom within the immediate rhetorical context.4 Furthermore, 
successful writing helps to redefine the matrix-and in that way becomes crea- 
tive. (Jefferson's Declaration contributed todefining the notion of America for 
its discourse community.) Every new text has the potential to alter the Text in 
some way; in fact, every text admitted into a discourse community changes the 
constitution of the community-and discourse communities can revise their 
discursive practices, as the Mendel and Frost examples suggest. 
Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the con- 
straints of some discourse community. We are constrained insofar as we must 
inevitably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which our 
discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to 
encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand 
our semiotic potential-with our goal being to effect change and establish our 
identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter. 
The Pedagogy of Intertextuality 
Intertextualitys not new. It may remind some of Eliot's notion of tradition, 
though the parameters are certainly broader. It is an important concept, though. 
It counters what I see as one prevailing composition pedagogy, one favoring a 
romantic image of the writer, offering asrole models the creativessayists, the 
Sunday Supplement freelancers, the Joan Didions, E. B. Whites, Calvin 
Trillins, and Russell Bakers. This dashing image appeals to our need for intel- 
lectual heroes; but underlying it may be an anti-rhetorical view: that writers are 
born, not made; that writing is individual, isolated, and internal; not social but 
eccentric. 
This view is firmly set in the intertext of our discipline. Our anthologies 
glorify the individual essayists, whose work is valued for its timelessness and 
creativity. Freshman rhetorics announce as the writer's proper goals personal 
insight, originality, and personal voice, or tell students that motivations for 
writing come from "within." Generally, this pedagogy assumes that such a 
thing as the writer actually exists-an autonomous writer exercising afree, 
creative will through the writing act-and that the writing process proceeds 
linearly from writer to text to reader. This partial picture of the process can all 
too readily become the picture, and our students can all too readily learn to 
overlook vital facets of discourse production. 
When we romanticize composition by overemphasizing the autonomy of the 
writer, important questions are overlooked, the same questions an intertextual view of writing would provoke: To what extent is the writer's product itself a 
part of a larger community writing process? How does the discourse communi- 
ty influence writers and readers within it? These are essential questions, but are 
perhaps outside the prevailing episteme of composition pedagogy, which 
presupposes the autonomous status of the writer as independent cogito. Talking 
about writing in terms of "social forces influencing the writer" raises the specter 
of determinism, and so is anathema. 
David Bartholomae summarizes this issue very nicely: "The struggle of the 
student writer is not the struggle to bring out that which is within; it is the 
struggle to carry out those ritual activities that grant our entrance into a closed 
society" (300). When we teach writing only as the act of "bringing out what is 
within," we risk undermining our own efforts. Intertextuality reminds us that 
"carrying out ritual activities" is also part of the writing process. Barthes 
reminds us that "the 'I' which approaches the text is already itself aplurality of 
other texts, of codes which are infinite" (10). 
Intertextuality suggests that our goal should be to help students learn to write 
for the discourse communities they choose to join. Students need help develop- 
ing out of what Joseph Williams calls their "pre-socialized cognitive states." 
According to Williams, pre-socialized writers are not sufficiently immersed in 
their discourse community to produce competent discourse: They do not know 
what can be presupposed, are not conscious of the distinctive intertextuality of 
the community, may be only superficially acquainted with explicit conventions. 
(Williams cites the example of the freshman whose paper for the English teach- 
er begins "Shakespeare is a famous Elizabethan dramatist.") Our immediate 
goal is to produce "socialized writers," who are full-fledged members of their 
discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that com- 
munity. Our long-range goal might be "post-socialized writers," those who 
have achieved such a degree of confidence, authority, power, or achievement in 
the discourse community so as to become part of the regulating body. They are 
able to vary conventions and question assumptions-i.e., effect change in 
communities-without fear of exclusion. 
Intertextuality has the potential to affect all facets of our composition peda- 
gogy. Certainly it supports writing across the curriculum as a mechanism for 
introducing students to the regulating systems of discourse communities. It 
raises questions about heuristics: Do different discourse communities apply 
different heuristics? It asserts the value of critical reading in the composition 
classroom. It requires that we rethink our ideas about plagiarism: Certainly 
imitatio is an important stage in the linguistic development of the writer. 
The most significant application might be in the area of audience analysis. 
Current pedagogies assume that when writers analyze audiences they should  focus on the expected flesh-and-blood readers. Intertextuality suggests that the 
proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the 
intertext of the discourse community. Instead of collecting demographic data 
about age, educationalevel, and social status, the writer might instead ask 
questions about the intertext: What are the conventional presuppositions ofthis 
community? In what forums do they assemble? What are the methodological 
assumptions? What is considered "evidence,"valid argument," and "proof'? 
A sample heuristic for such an analysis-what I term "forum analysis"-is 
included as an appendix. 
A critical reading of the discourse of a community may be the best way to 
understand it. (We see a version of this message in the advice to examine a 
journal before submitting articles for publication.) Traditionally, anthologies 
have provided students with reading material. However, the typical anthologies 
have two serious problems: (1) limited range-generally they overemphasize 
literary or expressive discourse; (2) unclear context-they frequently remove 
readings from their original contexts, thus disguising their intertextual nature. 
Several recently published readers have attempted to provide a broader selec- 
tion of readings in various forums, and actually discuss intertextuality. 
Maimon's Readings in the Arts and Sciences, Kinneavy's Writing in the Liberal 
Arts Tradition, and Bazerman's The Informed Writer are especially noteworthy. 
Writing assignments should be explicitly intertextual. If we regard each writ- 
ten product as a stage in a larger process-the dialectic process within adis- 
course community-then the individual writer's work is part of a web, part of a 
community search for truth and meaning. Writing assignments mightake the 
form of dialogue with other writers: Writing letters in response to articles is one 
kind of dialectic (e.g., letters responding to Atlantic Monthly or Science 
articles). Research assignments might be more community oriented rather than 
topic oriented; students might be asked to become involved in communities of 
researchers (e.g., the sociologists examining changing religious attitudes in 
American college students). The assignments in Maimon's Writing in the Arts 
and Sciences are excellent in this regard. 
Intertextual theory suggests that the key criteria for evaluating writing should 
be "acceptability" within some discourse community. "Acceptability" in- 
cludes, but goes well beyond, adherence to formal conventions. It includes 
choosing the "right" topic, applying the appropriate critical methodology, ad- 
hering to standards for evidence and validity, and in general adopting the 
community's discourse values-and of course borrowing the appropriate 
traces. Success is measured by the writer's ability to know what can be presup- 
posed and to borrow that community's traces effectively to create a text that 
contributes to the maintenance or, possibly, the definition of the community The writer is constrained by the community, and by its intertextual preferences 
and prejudices, but the effective writer works to assert the will against those 
community constraintso effect change. 
The Pepsi commercial and the Kent State news article show effective uses of 
the intertext. In the Kent State piece, John Kifner mixes picnic imagery 
("grassy campus gathering spot," "young people") with violent imagery ("burst 
of gunfire") to dramatize the event. The Pepsi ad writers combine two unlikely 
sets of traces, linking folksy depression-era American imagery with sci-fim- 
agery "stolen" from Spielberg. For this creative intertwining of traces, both 
discourses can probably be measured successful in their respective forums. 
Coda 
Clearly much of what intertextuality supports is already institutionalized 
(e.g., writing-across-the-curriculum programs). And yet, in freshman comp 
texts and anthologies especially, there is this tendency to see writing as individ- 
ual, as isolated, as heroic. Even after demonstrating quite convincingly that the 
Declaration was written by a team freely borrowing from acultural intertext, 
Elaine Maimon insists, against all the evidence she herself has collected, that 
"Despite the additions, deletions, and changes in wording that it went through, 
the Declaration is still Jefferson's writing" (Readings 26). Her saying this 
presupposes that the reader has just concluded the opposite. 
When we give our students romantic role models like E. B. White, Joan 
Didion, and Lewis Thomas, we create unrealistic expectations. This type of 
writer has often achieved post-socialized status within some discourse commu- 
nity (Thomas in the scientific community, for instance). Can we realistically 
expect our students to achieve this state without first becoming socialized, with- 
out learning first what it means to write within asocial context? Their role 
models ought not be only romantic heroes but also community writers like 
Jefferson, the anonymous writers of the Pepsi commercial-the Adsos of the 
world, not just the Aristotles. They need to see writers whose products are more 
evidently part of a larger process and whose work more clearly produces mean- 
ing in social contexts.

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jacksonrobin asked for the first time
in Mathematics·
3 Mar 2024

What is python theory?

Ans:

P_01: Introduction to Python Programming | Python for Beginners

Jenny's Lectures CS IT

Introduction to Python Programming Language

Python is currently the most popular programming language and also the fastest growing one. The concept of Python was introduced in 1989 and it is being used widely in machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence.

 

Main Areas of Python

Machine learning

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Python is used by big companies like Facebook and Twitter for managing and processing large amounts of data.

 

The language is easy to learn and has a wide range of applications. It supports multiple paradigms including object-oriented, procedural, and functional programming.

 

Python has been used in almost every area of programming, including by big companies like Google and YouTube.

 

The language is open source and has a huge community with many inbuilt packages, modules, and functions that can be used in programs without having to write them from scratch.

 

Python has many discussion forums where users can post queries and get answers. Frameworks like Django and Flask are available for web development.

 

Career Opportunities in Python

Python offers numerous career opportunities with an average salary ranging from 8 to 12 per nm. It's no wonder why this language is so popular. In the upcoming video, we will first explore the history of Python. As the saying goes, "know your enemy before going to battle." We will be using the latest version of Python 3.x, as Python 2.x is now obsolete and no longer supported since January 2020. So, let's focus on the latest version and explore the many career opportunities that Python has to offer.

 

Features and Application Areas of Python

If you are already familiar with Python and its features and application areas, please feel free to take notes. In the next video, we will dive deeper into the topic.

 

See you in the next video!

 

Bye for now!

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OC5771063 asked for the first time
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pandiselviselvi76 asked for the first time
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shafamaily2007 asked for the first time
in English·
2 Mar 2024

Guidelines: Respond to the following questions concerning David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University"; the purpose of these questions is to get you thinking about the text's significance and how to understand it: In Bartholomae's writing, how would you define "appropriate" or "appropriated by"? What is meant by a "specialised discourse" according to Bartholomae? What does a beginner student hope to achieve by engaging in a "specialised discourse"? "The role of privilege" in a "specialised discourse"—how would you characterise it? Why do you think it's necessary for you to read this in order to comprehend writing, and how may you use this essay to the composition of your formal essay?

here is the reading that your going to read and then answer the questions above 

INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY1 
Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every in-
dividual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of 
discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits 
and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social 
conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining 
or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and 
the powers it carries with it. 
Foucault, "The Discourse on Language" (227) 
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. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we 
do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, 
reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of 
our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses 
of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts 
education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn 
to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes-to write, 
for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental 
psychologist the next, to work within fields where the rules 
governing the presentation of examples or the development of 
an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional, mys-
terious. 
The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a 
specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though 
they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropol-
ogists or economists; they have to invent the university by as-
sembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise 
between idiosyncracy, a personal history, and the requirements 
of convention, the history of a discipline. They must learn to 
speak our language. Or they must dare to speak it, or to carry 
off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be 
required long before the skill is "learned." And this, understand-
ably, causes problems. 
Let me look quickly at an example. Here is an essay written 
by a college freshman, a basic writer: 
In the past time I thought that an incident was creative was 
when I had to make a clay model of the earth, but not of 
the classical or your everyday model of the earth which 
consists of the two cores, the mantle and the crust. I thought 
of these things in a dimension of which it would be unique, 
but easy to comprehend. Of course, your materials to work 
with were basic and limited at the same time, but thought 
help to put this limit into a right attitude or frame of mind 
to work with the clay. 
In the beginning of the clay model, I had to research and 
learn the different dimensions of the earth (in magnitude, 
quantity, state of matter, etc.) After this, I learned how to 
put this into the clay and come up with something different 
than any other person in my class at the time. In my opinion, 
color coordination and shape was the key to my creativity 
of the clay model of the earth. 
Creativity is the venture of the mind at work with the 
mechanics relay to the limbs from the cranium, which stores 
and triggers this action. It can be a burst of energy released 
at a precise time a thought is being transmitted. This can 
cause a frenzy of the human body, but it depends of the 
characteristics of the individual and how they can relay the 
message clearly enough through mechanics of the body to us 
as an observer. Then we must determine if it is creative or 
a learned process varied by the individuals thought process. 
Creativity is indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world 
will not succeed into the future and progress like it should. I am continually impressed by the patience and good will of 
our students. This student was writing a placement essay during freshman orientation. (The problem set to him was, "Describe a time when you did something you felt to be creative. Then, on 
the basis of the incident you have described, go on to draw some 
general conclusions about 'creativity'.") He knew that university 
faculty would be reading and evaluating his essay, and so he 
wrote for them. 
In some ways it is a remarkable performance. He is trying on 
the discourse even though he doesn't have the knowledge that 
makes the discourse more than a routine, a set of conventional 
rituals and gestures. And he does this, I think, even though he 
knows he doesn't have the knowledge that makes the discourse 
more than a routine. He defines himself as a researcher, working 
systematically, and not as a kid in a high school class: "I thought 
of these things in a dimension of ... "; "had to research and 
learn the different dimensions of the earth (in magnitude, quantity, 
state of matter, etc.)." He moves quickly into a specialized lan-
guage (his approximation of our jargon) and draws both a general, 
textbook-like conclusion ("Creativity is the venture of the mind 
at work . .. ")and a resounding peroration ("Creativity is indeed 
a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed into the 
future and progress like it should.") The writer has even, with 
that "indeed" and with the qualifications and the parenthetical 
expressions of the opening paragraphs, picked up the rhythm of 
our prose. And through it all he speaks with an impressive air 
of authority. 
There is an elaborate but, I will argue, a necessary and enabling 
fiction at work here as the student dramatizes his experience in 
a "setting" -the setting required by the discourse-where he can 
speak to us as a companion, a fellow researcher. As I read the 
essay, there is only one moment when the fiction is broken, when 
we are addressed differently. The student says, "Of course, your 
materials to work with were basic and limited at the same time, 
but thought help to put this limit into a right attitude or frame 
of mind to work with the clay." At this point, I think, we become 
students and he the teacher, giving us a lesson (as in, "You take 
your pencil in your right hand and put your paper in front of 
you."). This is, however, one of the most characteristic slips of 
basic writers. It is very hard for them to take on the role-the 
voice, the person-of an authority whose authority is rooted in 
scholarship, analysis, or research. They slip, then, into the more 
immediately available and realizable voice of authority, the voice 
of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at 
the dinner table. They offer advice or homilies rather than "ac-
ademic" conclusions. There is a similar break in the final par-
agraph, where the conclusion that pushes for a definition ("Creativity is the venture of the mind at work with the mechanics 
relay to the limbs from the cranium ... ") is replaced by a 
conclusion which speaks in the voice of an Elder ("Creativity is 
indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed 
into the future and progress like it should."). 
It is not uncommon, then, to find such breaks in the concluding 
sections of essays written by basic writers. Here is the concluding 
section of an essay written by a student about his work as a 
mechanic. He had been asked to generalize about "work" after 
reviewing an on-the-job experience or incident that "stuck in his 
mind" as somehow significant. 
How could two repairmen miss a leak? Lack of pride? No 
incentive? Lazy? I don't know. 
At this point the writer is in a perfect position to speculate, to 
move from the problem to an analysis of the problem. Here is 
how the paragraph continues however (and notice the change in 
pronoun reference): 
From this point on, I take my time, do it right, and don't let 
customers get under your skin. If they have a complaint, tell 
them to call your boss and he'll be more than glad to handle 
it. Most important, worry about yourself, and keep a clear 
eye on everyone, for there's always someone trying to take 
advantage of you, anytime and anyplace. 
We get neither a technical discussion nor an "academic" dis-
cussion but a Lesson on Life. 2 This is the language he uses to 
address the general question, "How could two repairmen miss a 
leak?" The other brand of conclusion, the more academic one, 
would have required him to speak of his experience in our terms; 
it would, that is, have required a special vocabulary, a special 
system of presentation, and an interpretive scheme (or a set of 
commonplaces) he could use to identify and talk about the mystery 
of human error. The writer certainly had access to the range of 
acceptable commonplaces for such an explanation: "lack of pride," 
"no incentive," "lazy." Each would dictate its own set of phrases, 
examples, and conclusions, and we, his teachers, would know 
how to write out each argument, just as we would know how to 
write out more specialized arguments of our own. A "common-
place," then, is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept 
or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration. 
We all use commonplaces to orient ourselves in the world; they 
provide a point of reference and a set of "prearticulated" expla-
nations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience. The phrase "lack of pride" carries with it its own 
account for the repairman's error just as, at another point in time, 
a reference to "original sin" would provide an explanation, or 
just as, in a certain university classroom, a reference to "alien-
ation" would enable a writer to continue and complete the dis-
cussion. While there is a way in which these terms are inter-
changeable, they are not all permissible. A student in a composition 
class would most likely be turned away from a discussion of 
original sin. Commonplaces are the "controlling ideas" of our 
composition textbooks, textbooks that not only insist upon a set 
form for expository writing but a set view of public life. 3 
When the student above says, "I don't know," he is not saying, 
then, that he has nothing to say. He is saying that he is not in 
a position to carry on this discussion. And so we are addressed 
as apprentices rather than as teachers or scholars. To speak to 
us as a person of status or privilege, the writer can either speak 
to us in our terms-in the privileged language of university 
discourse-or, in default (or in defiance), he can speak to us as 
though we were children, offering us the wisdom of experience. 
I think it is possible to say that the language of the "Clay 
Model" paper has come through the writer and not from the 
writer. The writer has located himself (he has located the self 
that is represented by the I on the page) in a context that is, 
finally, beyond him, not his own and not available to his im-
mediate procedures for inventing and arranging text. I would not, 
that is, call this essay an example of "writer-based" prose. I would 
not say that it is egocentric or that it represents the "interior 
monologue of a writer thinking and talking to himself" (Flower 
63). It is, rather, the record of a writer who has lost himself in 
the discourse of his readers. There is a context beyond the reader 
that is not the world but a way of talking about the world, a 
way of talking that determines the use of examples, the possible 
conclusions, the acceptable commonplaces, and the key words of 
an essay on the construction of a clay model of the earth. This 
writer has entered the discourse without successfully approxi-
mating it. 
Linda Flower has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writ-
ers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in ne-
gotiating the transition between writer-based and reader-based 
prose. Expert writers, in other words, can better imagine how a 
reader will respond to a text and can transform or restructure 
what they have to say around a goal shared with a reader. 
Teaching students to revise for readers, then, will better prepare 
them to write initially with a reader in mind. The success of this pedagogy depends upon the degree to which a writer can imagine 
and conform to a reader's goals. The difficulty of this act of 
imagination, and the burden of such conformity, are so much at 
the heart of the problem that a teacher must pause and take 
stock before offering revision as a solution. Students like the 
student who wrote the "Clay Model" paper are not so much 
trapped in a private language as they are shut out from one of 
the privileged languages of public life, a language they are aware 
of but cannot control. 
Our students, I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated 
by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though 
they were easily or comfortably one with their audience. If you 
look at the situation this way, suddenly the problem of audience 
awareness becomes enormously complicated. One of the common 
assumptions of both composition research and composition teach-
ing is that at some "stage" in the process of composing an essay 
a writer's ideas or his motives must be tailored to the needs and 
expectations of his audience. A writer has to "build bridges" 
between his point of view and his readers. He has to anticipate 
and acknowledge his readers' assumptions and biases. He must 
begin with "common points of departure" before introducing new 
or controversial arguments. There is a version of the pastoral at 
work here. It is assumed that a person of low status (like a 
shepherd) can speak to a person of power (like a courtier), but 
only (at least so far as the language is concerned) if he is not a 
shepherd at all, but actually a member of the court out in the 
fields in disguise. 
Writers who can successfully manipulate an audience (or, to 
use a less pointed language, writers who can accommodate their 
motives to their readers' expectations) are writers who can both 
imagine and write from a position of privilege. They must, that 
is, see themselves within a privleged discourse, one that already 
includes and excludes groups of readers. They must be either 
equal to or more powerful than those they would address. The 
writing, then, must somehow transform the political and social 
relationships between basic writing students and their teachers. 
If my students are going to write for me by knowing who I 
am-and if this means more than knowing my prejudices, psych-
ing me out-it means knowing what I know; it means having 
the knowledge of a professor of English. They have, then, to 
know what I know and how I know what I know (the interpretive 
schemes that define the way I would work out the problems I 
set for them); they have to learn to write what I would write, 
or to offer up some approximation of that discourse. The problem of audience awareness, then, is a problem of power and finesse. 
It cannot be addressed, as it is in most classroom exercises, by 
giving students privilege and denying the situation of the class-
room, by having students write to an outsider, someone excluded 
from their privileged circle: "Write about 'To His Coy Mistress,' 
not for your teacher, but for the students in your class": "Describe 
Pittsburgh to someone who has never been there"; "Explain to 
a high school senior how best to prepare for college"; "Describe 
baseball to a Martian." 
Exercises such as these allow students to imagine the needs 
and goals of a reader and they bring those needs and goals forward 
as a dominant constraint in the construction of an essay. And 
they argue, implicity, what is generally true about writing-that 
it is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity. What 
they fail to address is-the central problem of academic writing, 
where students must assume the right of speaking to someone 
who knows Pittsburgh or "To His Coy Mistress" better than they 
do, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily 
available utterances about a subject are inadequate. It should be 
clear that when I say that I know Pittsburgh better than my basic 
writing students I am talking about a way of knowing that is also 
a way of writing. There may be much that they know that I don't 
know, but in the setting of the university classroom I have a way 
of talking about the town that is "better" (and for arbitrary 
reasons) than theirs. 
I think that all writers, in order to write, must imagine for 
themselves the privilege of being "insiders" -that is, of being 
both inside an established and powerful discourse, and of being 
granted a special right to speak. And I think that right to speak 
is seldom conferred upon us-upon any of us, teachers or stu-
dents-by virtue of the fact that we have invented or discovered 
an original idea. Leading students to believe that they are re-
sponsible for something new or original, unless they understand 
what those words mean with regard to writing, is a dangerous 
and counterproductive practice. We do have the right to expect 
students to be active and engaged, but that is more a matter of 
being continually and stylistically working against the inevitable 
presence of conventional language; it is not a matter of inventing 
a language that is new. 
When students are writing for a teacher, writing becomes more 
problematic than it is for the students who are describing baseball 
to a Martian. The students, in effect, have to assume privilege 
without having any. And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of a particular com-
munity-within a set of specifically acceptable gestures and com-
monplaces-learning, at least as it is defined in the liberal arts 
curriculum, becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than 
a matter of invention and discovery. 
What our beginning students need to learn is to extend them-
selves into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals, gestures, habits 
of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions, and nec-
essary connections that determine the "what might be said" and 
constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic 
community. The course of instruction that would make this pos-
sible would be based on a sequence of illustrated assignments 
and would allow for successive approximations of academic or 
"disciplinary" discourse. Students will not take on our peculiar 
ways of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking all at once. Nor 
will the command of a subject like sociology, at least as that 
command is represented by the successful completion of a mul-
tiple choice exam, enable students to write sociology. Our colleges 
and universities, by and large, have failed to involve basic writing 
students in scholarly projects, projects that would allow them to 
act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise. 
Much of the written work students do is test-taking, report or 
summary, work that places them outside the working discourse 
of the academic community, where they are expected to admire 
and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, 
where they can do its work and participate in a common enter-
prise.4 This is a failure of teachers and curriculum designers who, 
even if they speak of writing as a mode of learning, all too often 
represent writing as a "tool" to be used by an (hopefully) educated 
mind. 
Pat Bizzell is one of the most important scholars writing now 
on basic writers and on the special requirements of academic 
discourse. 5 In a recent essay, "Cognition, Convention and Cer-
tainty: What We Need to Know About Writing," she argues that 
the problems of basic writers might be 
better understood in terms of their unfamiliarly with the 
academic discourse community, combined, perhaps, with such 
limited experience outside their native discourse communi-
ties that they are unaware that there is such a thing as a 
discourse community with conventions to be mastered. What 
is underdeveloped is their knowledge both of the ways experience is constituted and interpreted in the academic  disccourse community and of the fact that all discourse com-
munities constitute and interpret experience. (230) 
One response to the problems of basic writers, then, would be 
to determine just what the community's conventions are, so that 
those conventions can be written out, "demystified," and taught 
in our classrooms. Teachers, as a result, could be more precise 
and helpful when they ask students to "think," "argue," "de-
scribe," or "define." Another response would be to examine the 
essays written by basic writers-their approximations of academic 
discourse-to determine more clearly where the problems lie. If 
we look at their writing, and if we look at it in the context of 
other student writing, we can better see the points of discord 
when students try to write their way into the university. 
The purpose of the remainder of this paper will be to examine 
some of the most striking and characteristic problems as they are 
presented in the expository essays of basic writers. I will be 
concerned, then, with university discourse in its most generalized 
form-that is, as represented by introductory courses-and not 
with the special conventions required by advanced work in the 
various disciplines. And I will be concerned with the difficult, 
and often violent, accommodations that occur when students 
locate themselves in a discourse that is not "naturally" or im-
mediately theirs. 
I have reviewed 500 essays written in response to the "crea-
tivity" question used during one of our placement exams. (The 
essay cited at the opening of this paper was one of that group.) 
Some of the essays were written by basic writers (or, more 
properly, those essays led readers to identify the writers as "basic 
writers"); some were written by students who "passed" (who 
were granted immediate access to the community of writers at 
the university). As I read these essays, I was looking to determine 
the stylistic resources that enabled writers to locate themselves 
within an "academic" discourse. My bias as a reader should be 
clear by now. I was not looking to see how the writer might 
represent the skills demanded by a neutral language (a language 
whose key features were paragraphs, topic sentences, transitions, 
and the like-features of a clear and orderly mind). I was looking 
to see what happened when a writer entered into a language to 
locate himself (a textual self) and his subject, and I was looking 
to see how, once entered, that language made or unmade a writer. 
Here is one essay. Its writer was classified as a basic writer. 
Since the essay is relatively free of sentence level errors, that decision must have been rooted in some perceived failure of the 
discourse itself. 
I am very interested in music, and I try to be creative in my 
interpretation of music. While in high school, I was a member 
of a jazz ensemble. The members of the ensemble were given 
chances to improvise and be creative in various songs. I feel 
that this was a great experience for me, as well as the other 
members. I was proud to know that I could use my imagi-
nation and feelings to create music other than what was 
written. 
Creativity to me, means being free to express yourself in a 
way that is unique to you, not having to conform to certain 
rules and guidelines. Music is only one of the many areas 
in which people are given opportunities to show their crea-
tivity. Sculpting, carving, building, art, and acting are just a 
few more areas where people can show their creativity. 
Through my music I conveyed feelings and thoughts which 
were important to me. Music was my means of showing 
creativity. In whatever form creativity takes, whether it be 
music, art, or science, it is an important aspect of our lives 
because it enables us to be individuals. 
Notice, in this essay, the key gesture, one that appears in all 
but a few of the essays I read. The student defines as his own 
that which is a commonplace. "Creativity, to me, means being 
free to express yourself in a way that is unique to you, not having 
to conform to certain rules and guidelines." This act of appro-
priation constitutes his authority; it constitutes his authority as 
a writer and not just as a musician (that is, as someone with a 
story to tell). There were many essays in the set that told only 
a story, where the writer's established presence was as a musician 
or a skier or someone who painted designs on a van, but not as 
a person removed from that experience interpreting it, treating 
it as a metaphor for something else (creativity). Unless those 
stories were long, detailed, and very well told (unless the writer 
was doing more than saying, "I am a skier or a musician or a 
van-painter"), those writers were all given low ratings. 
Notice also that the writer of the jazz paper locates himself 
and his experience in relation to the commonplace (creativity is 
unique expression; it is not having to conform to rules or guide-
lines) regardless of whether it is true or not. Anyone who im-
provises "knows" that improvisation follows rules and guidelines. It is the power of the commonplace (its truth as a recognizable 
and, the writer believes, as a final statement) that justifies the 
example and completes the essay. The example, in other words, 
has value because it stands within the field of the commonplace. 
It is not the occasion for what one might call an "objective" 
analysis or a "close" reading. It could also be said that the essay 
stops with the articulation of the commonplace. The following 
sections speak only to the power of that statement. The reference 
to "sculpting, carving, building, art, and acting" attest to the 
universality of the commonplace (and it attests to the writer's 
nervousness with the status he has appropriated for himself-he 
is saying, "Now, I'm not the only one here who's done something 
unique."). The commonplace stands by itself. For this writer, it 
does not need to be elaborated. By virtue of having written it, 
he has completed the essay and established the contract by which 
we may be spoken to as equals: "In whatever form creativity 
takes, whether it be music, art, or science, it is an important 
aspect of our lives because it enables us to be individuals." (For 
me to break that contract, to argue that my life is not represented 
in that essay, is one way for me to begin as a teacher with that 
student in that essay.) 
I said that the writer of the jazz paper offered up a commonplace 
regardless of whether it was "true" or not, and this, I said, was 
an example of the power of a commonplace to determine the 
meaning of an example. A commonplace determines a system of 
interpretation that can be used to "place" an example within a 
standard system of belief. You can see a similar process at work 
in this essay. 
During the football season, the team was supposed to wear 
the same type of cleats and the same type socks, I figured 
that I would change this a little by wearing my white shoes 
instead of black and to cover up the team socks with a pair 
of my own white ones. I thought that this looked better than 
what we were wearing, and I told a few of the other people 
on the team to change too. They agreed that it did look better 
and they changed there combination to go along with mine. 
After the game people came up to us and said that it looked 
very good the way we wore our socks, and they wanted to 
know why we changed from the rest of the team. 
I feel that creativity comes from when a person lets his 
imagination come up with ideas and he is not afraid to express 
them. Once you create something to do it will be original and unique because it came about from your own imagination 
and if any one else tries to copy it, it won't be the same 
because you thought of it first from your own ideas. 
This is not an elegant paper, but it seems seamless, tidy. If the 
paper on the clay model of the earth showed an ill-fit between 
the writer and his project, here the discourse seems natural, 
smooth. You could reproduce this paper and hand it out to a 
class, and it would take a lot of prompting before the students 
sensed something fishy and one of the more aggressive ones might 
say, "Sure he came up with the idea of wearing white shoes and 
white socks. Him and Billy White-shoes Johnson. Come on. He 
copied the very thing he said was his own idea, 'original and 
unique'." 
The "I" of this text, the "I" who "figured," "thought," and 
"felt" is located in a conventional rhetoric of the self that turns 
imagination into origination (I made it), that argues an ethic of 
production (I made it and it is mine), and that argues a tight 
scheme of intention (I made it because I decided to make it). The 
rhetoric seems invisible because it is so common. This "I" (the 
maker) is also located in a version of history that dominates 
classroom accounts of history. It is an example of the "Great 
Man" theory, where history is rolling along-the English novel 
is dominated by a central, intrusive narrative presence; America 
is in the throes of a great depression; during football season the 
team was supposed to wear the same kind of cleats and socks-
until a figure appears, one who can shape history-Henry James, 
FDR, the writer of the football paper-and everything is changed. 
In the argument of the football paper, "I figured," "I thought," 
"I told," "They argeed," and, as a consequence, "I feel that 
creativity comes from when a person lets his imagination come 
up with ideas and he is not afraid to express them." The story 
of appropriation becomes a narrative of courage and conquest. 
The writer was able to write that story when he was able to 
imagine himself in that discourse. Getting him out of it will be 
difficult matter indeed. 
There are ways, I think, that a writer can shape history in the 
very act of writing it. Some students are able to enter into a 
discourse, but, by stylistic maneuvers, to take possession of it at 
the same time. They don't originate a discourse, but they locate 
themselves within it aggressively, self-consciously. 
Here is one particularly successful essay. Notice the specialized 
vocabulary, but also the way in which the text continually refers 
to its own language and to the language of others. Throughout my life, I have been interested and intrigued by 
music. My mother has often told me of the times, before I 
went to school, when I would "conduct" the orchestra on 
her records. I continued to listen to music and eventually 
started to play the guitar and the clarinet. Finally, at about 
the age of twelve, I started to sit down and to try to write 
songs. Even though my instrumental skills were far from my 
own high standards, I would spend much of my spare time 
during the day with a guitar around my neck, trying to 
produce a piece of music. 
Each of these sessions, as I remember them, had a rather set 
format. I would sit in my bedroom, strumming different com-
binations of the five or six chords I could play, until I heard 
a series which sounded particularly good to me. After this, 
I set the music to a suitable rhythm, (usually dependent on 
my mood at the time), and ran through the tune until I could 
play it fairly easily. Only after this section was complete did 
I go on to writing lyrics, which generally followed along the 
lines of the current popular songs on the radio. 
At the time of the writing, I felt that my songs were, in 
themselves, an original creation of my own; that is, I, alone, 
made them. However, I now see that, in this sense of the 
word, I was not creative. The songs themselves seem to be 
an oversimplified form of the music I listened to at the time. 
In a more fitting sense, however, I was being creative. Since 
I did not purposely copy my favorite songs, I was, effectively, 
originating my songs from my own "process of creativity." 
To achieve my goal, I needed what a composer would call 
"inspiration" for my piece. In this case the inspiration-was 
the current hit on the radio. Perhaps with my present point 
of view, I feel that I used too much "inspiration" in my 
songs, but, at that time, I did not. 
Creativity, therefore, is a process which, in my case, involved 
a certain series of "small creations" if you like. As well, it 
is something, the appreciation of which varies with one's 
point of view, that point of view being set by the person's 
experience, tastes, and his own personal view of creativity. 
The less experienced tend to allow for less originality, while 
the more experienced demand real originality to classify 
something a "creation." Either way, a term as abstract as this 
is perfectly correct, and open to interpretation.  


This writer is consistently and dramatically conscious of herself 
forming something to say out of what has been said and out of 
what she has been saying in the act of writing this paper. "Crea-
tivity" begins, in this paper, as "original creation." What she 
thought was "creativity," however, she now calls "imitation" and, 
as she says, "in this sense of the word" she was not "creative." 
In another sense, however, she says that she was creative since 
she didn't purposefully copy the songs but used them as "inspi-
ration." 
The writing in this piece (that is, the work of the writer within 
the essay) goes on in spite of, or against, the language that keeps 
pressing to give another name to her experience as a song writer 
and to bring the discussion to closure. (Think of the quick closure 
of the football shoes paper in comparison.) Its style is difficult, 
highly qualified. It relies on quotation marks and parody to set 
off the language and attitudes that belong to the discourse (or 
the discourses) it would reject, that it would not take as its own 
proper location.6 
In the papers I've examined in this essay, the writers have 
shown a varied awareness of the codes-or the competing codes-
that operate within a discourse. To speak with authority student 
writers have not only to speak in another's voice but through 
another's "code"; and they not only have to do this, they have 
to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with 
power and wisdom; and they not only have to do this, they have 
to do it before they know what they are doing, before they have 
a project to participate in and before, at least in terms of our 
disciplines, they have anything to say. Our students may be able 
to enter into a conventional discourse and speak, not as them-
selves, but through the voice of the community. The university, 
however, is the place where "common" wisdom is only of negative 
value; it is something to work against. The movement toward a 
more specialized discourse begins (or perhaps, best begins) when 
a student can both define a position of privilege, a position that 
sets him against a "common" discourse, and when he can work 
self-consciously, critically, against not only the "common" code 
but his own. 
The stages of development that I've suggested are not neces-
sarily marked by corresponding levels in the type or frequency 
of error, at least not by the type or frequency of sentence level 
errors. I am arguing, then, that a basic writer is not necessarily 
a writer who makes a lot of mistakes. In fact, one of the problems 
with curricula designed to aid basic writers is that they too often begin with the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of 
a basic writer is the presence of sentence level error. Students 
are placed in courses because their placement essays show a high 
frequency of such errors and those courses are designed with the 
goal of making those errors go away. This approach to the prob-
lems of the basic writer ignores the degree to which error is not 
a constant feature but a marker in the development of a writer. 
Students who can write reasonably correct narratives may fall to 
pieces when faced with more unfamiliar assignments. More im-
portantly, however, such courses fail to serve the rest of the 
curriculum. On every campus there is a significant number of 
college freshman who require a course to introduce them to the 
kinds of writing that are required for a university education. 
Some of these students can write correct sentences and some 
cannot, but as a group they lack the facility other freshmen 
possess when they are faced with an academic writing task. 
The "White Shoes" essay, for example, shows fewer sentence 
level errors than the "Clay Model" paper. This may well be due 
to the fact, however, that the writer of that paper stayed well 
within the safety of familiar territory. He kept himself out of 
trouble by doing what he could easily do. The tortuous syntax 
of the more advanced papers on my list is a syntax that represents 
a writer's struggle with a difficult and unfamiliar language, and 
it is a syntax that can quickly lead an inexperienced writer into 
trouble. The syntax and punctuation of the "Composing Songs" 
essay, for example, shows the effort that is required when a writer 
works against the pressure of conventional discourse. If the prose 
is inelegant (although I'll confess I admire those dense sentences), 
it is still correct. This writer has a command of the linguistic 
and stylistic resources (the highly embedded sentences, the use 
of parentheses and quotation marks) required to complete the act 
of writing. It is easy to imagine the possible pitfalls for a writer 
working without this facility. 
There was no camera trained on the "Clay Model" writer while 
he was writing, and I have no protocol of what was going through 
his mind, but it is possible to speculate that the syntactic diffi-
culties of sentences like the following are the result of an attempt 
to use an unusual vocabulary and to extend his sentences beyond 
the boundaries that would be "normal" in his speech or writing: 
In past time I thought that an incident was creative was when 
I had to make a clay model of the earth, but not of the 
classical or your everyday model of the earth which consists 
of the two cores, the mantle and the crust. I thought of these  things in a dimension of which it would be unique, but easy 
to comprehend. 
There is reason to believe, that is, that the problem is with this 
kind of sentence, in this context. If the problem of the last sentence 
is a problem of holding together these units-"I thought," "di-
mension," "unique," and "easy to comprehend"-then the lin-
guistic problem is not a simple matter of sentence construction. 
I am arguing, then, that such 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. While writing, and in the thrust of 
his need to complete the sentence, he has the key words but not 
the utterance. (And to recover the utterance, I suspect, he will 
need to do more than revise the sentence.) The invisible con-
ventions, the prepared phrases remain too distant for the state-
ment to be completed. The writer must get inside of a discourse 
he can only partially imagine. The act of constructing a sentence, 
then, becomes something like an act of transcription, where the 
voice on the tape unexpectedly fades away and becomes inau-
dible. 
Mina Shaughnessy speaks of the advanced writer as a writer 
with a more facile but still incomplete possession of this prior 
discourse. In the case of the advanced writer, the evidence of a 
problem is the presence of dissonant, redundant, or imprecise 
language, as in a sentence such as this: "No education can be 
total, it must be continuous." Such a student Shaughnessy says, 
could be said to hear the "melody of formal English" while still 
unable to make precise or exact distinctions. And, she says, the 
pre-packaging feature of language, the possibility of taking over 
phrases and whole sentences without much thought about them, 
threatens the writer now as before. The writer, as we have said, 
inherits the language out of which he must fabricate his own 
messages. He is therefore in a constant tangle with the language, 
obliged to recognize its public, communal nature and yet driven 
to invent out of this language his own statements (19). 
For the unskilled writer, the problem is different in degree and 
not in kind. The inexperienced writer is left with a more frag-
mentary record of the comings and goings of academic discourse. 
Or, as I said above, he often has the key words without the 
complete statements within which they are already operating. 
It may very well be that some students will need to learn to 
crudely mimic the " distinctive register" of academic discourse 
before they are prepared to actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse, and before they are sophisticated enough with 
the refinements of tone and gesture to do it with grace or elegance. 
To say this, however, is to say that our students must be our 
students. Their initial progress will be marked by their abilities 
to take on the role of privilege, by their abilities to establish 
authority. 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 rel-
atively 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. He will have 
to be convinced that it is better to write sentences he might not 
so easily control, and he will have to be convinced that it is 
better to write muddier and more confusing prose (in order that 
it may sound like ours), and this will be harder than convincing 
the "Clay Model" writer to continue what he has begun?


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