Bartholomae/Elbow Debate

BEWARE: This posting is much in the fashion of free though in that I wanted to help myself come to grips with how I felt regarding the class discussion from Tuesday.

“Academic writing—language stripped of the false dressings of style and fashion…”
I do not agree with this quote because, to me, style is where one’s writing personality lies. I do not think that academic writing is to be without personality. Although it may call for that elusive “objectivity,” it does not call for a mimetic de-personalized method of externalizing one’s academic arguments and ideas.

Without the knowledge of others, how can we come to know a broad spectrum of things? Our knowledge, our creation of ideas, will be completely shaped by the lives we have led and the events within those lives. We live in a culture that tries to celebrate diversity all of the way to the idea of diversity of knowledge. Within this diversity we suspect that a broader more complete knowledge is possible. Although it is not necessarily limited to the following, the personal essay allows one to limit her writing to that of her own experiences, conclusions, and knowledge. Academic writing attempts to stir the diverse celebrated knowledge of academia (those whose ideas were also shaped by their own lives in combination with the knowledge of their predecessors) into the personal essay.

One example, I think, of academic writing is the literary analysis of a text. Such a paper may present the personal idea of a student (though it may have been thought before that student but is nonetheless original in the mind of that student) regarding the text’s theme, ideologies, etc. However, that student must use the tools of academia before her (Aristotle’s recognition of genre, Sophocles’ mimesis, Freudian psychology, etc.) so that her personal idea/argument can be related to the world in something broader than her experience. If she only wrote the paper and related its ideas/arguments to her own life experience, those outside the realm of her experience could not necessarily understand it. The nearly guaranteed common ground of academia therefore exists as the medium for this exchange of ideas. It is through the common understanding of academic language and rhetoric that the paper’s author can connect her personal experience with the text to the personal experience of the reader. Does that sound crazy?

It is interesting. Elbow talks of wanting students who write to articulate their own thinking, and he later says that he feels his students “know more than they are getting into words.” This begs the question. Where does the struggle for teaching writing lie? In the ability to move thought to paper for the self or in the ability to move thought to paper for others? If they know more than what they write, why would they need to write it since his desire is for them to use writing as a way of removing the fog from about their thoughts so that they can understand what they are thinking?