jwhdhdjdueiwisidudLv1

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?