Chapter 4, “Writing, Reading and Authority,” presents a case
study of a student named John, and his academic development in the
Bartholomae, BRW adolescence-themed
class. At first I found this read a bit excruciating and Discovery of Competence–like, as John began to discover an evolved
sense of his own self through the extensive and exploratory process of reading,
drafting and dialoguing with his teachers.
Wall argued for the importance of
“posture of authority,” or the idea that “academic composing requires us
to recognize mutually opposing forces of individual expression and social
convention,” and through the interplay of these forces, a writer assumes a
stance (p. 106). We learn of John’s
process of beginning to assume authority over his own ideas in written
discourse, and the chapter finally stops being so excruciating when we see the progress
John makes in the end (I suppose we had to experience some of the pain he went
through to get to that point…)
I found the writing samples provided pretty
fascinating, actually. At the beginning
of the semester John produced this snippet of writing:
So for the first time
in my life I talk about something that I could never talk to anybody else. I told him how I didn’t think I was as good
as anybody else (p. 111).
Toward the end, (for another paper) he wrote:
Maya was ambitious and
always exploring her environment. Thus,
she succeeded. On the other hand, Holden was not ambitious and did not explore
his environment. He was overwhelmed by his choices. Holden would have been
better off in Samoa..” (p. 132)
It’s not just
that John uses some fancy discourse markers in the second example (but wow those make a difference!), and while Hull does
mention a “superficial and perfunctory attitude toward difficult reading” visible
still in the final month of the semester, there are also “gains in coherence,
hypothetical deductive reasoning and academic diction” (p. 132). Wall was still concerned at this point, but learned
that two and a half years later, John was succeeding in his literature class and
was able to express an understanding of the complex relationship between writers and
academic communities (see p. 133).
A couple key aspects of John’s BRW course which helped
him get to this point include the following:
- John’s teachers explicitly rejected the intentionalist model of composing, which would have required knowing what to say and how to say it before sitting down to write (p. 109). It was mentioned that John probably benefited from not having been previously instructed in the intentionlist model (which in a way put him ahead of some of his more advanced peers).
- John’s process of discovery drafting and revision allowed him to the “first step in [his] efforts to break out of the very dependence on the words of others that he describes in [his] draft.” He was allowed the freedom of dialoging with the self he created on paper and defining his own new persona, rather than depending on the words of others (p. 111).
- Related to the point above, John engaged in dialogue with the language already on the page to achieve his main ideas. “You discover what you mean by responding critically to what you have said” (see p. 125). This is the dialectic of composing.
The generative process of discovery drafting clearly
allowed John to develop as an emerging member of the academic discourse
community, and I appreciated reading about his progress.
 |
| is this also true of writing in general? |
No comments:
Post a Comment