Where Writing Begins

David Bartholomae’s approach to writing in “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins” entirely shifts the paradigm of writing instruction. In fact he begins with a quote from Edward Said that states that writing should evolve from the unknown, in a student-based construct that excludes a teacher – a process that is autodidactic. As Bartholomae outlines what that writing process might look like, he essentially discards all conventional approaches to writing about “an assigned topic” and instead suggests that students essentially come up with their own within the discipline they are studying, that there is no such thing as a subject at the outset of the process, and that students need to define their own in the course of conscious and critical writing and thinking, based on a discourse that evolves from their known parameters to a translation thereof.  Bartholomae says that the subject of a written exercise needs to be interfered with, opened up, and set out in a discourse that is not closed.  It is not a reservoir but an opening dam – one thing leading to another in a succession of discoveries as students work to find something to say, spending enough time with a subject to sort it all out.

The process is non-linear as students write, read, revise, talk about it, read, revise…and so on, until the work expresses something that has meaning for the writer/reader. Teachers are not mystical, magical keepers of the secret keys – they are interferers and disruptors in the process, keeping the students thinking and looking at their work through different lenses, actively engaged in the processes of discovery and investigations of effective discourse. There is no weekly test of “Did you learn this technique? Write an essay and prove it?” but instead an organically alive investigative process involving student, teacher, and the entire classroom.

Some of Bartholomae’s principles of assignment writing are:

•  First: if assignments are invitations for students to enter into discourses that are not their own, they must lead students through successive approximations, and not necessarily linearly. 
• Second: A change in one’s conception of the world involves not only a change in what one encounters, but also in how one translates it. Students develop their own means of interpreting their experiences. Writing experiences should be generative experiences.
• Third: individual assignments should be part of a larger, group project
• Fourth: students need to imagine a subject as a discourse, a set of conventional available utterances within which they can locate utterances of their own. The subject is imagined as a discourse one can enter, and not as a thing that carries with it experiences or ideas that can be communicated.

One sentence summation:

Bartholomae sees student writers as inventors of their own discourse, exploring the disciplines at hand (from works of literature to scientific discoveries) and then interpreting what they experience through a system of individualized utterances that evolve into a personally meaningful dialogue which engages both writer and reader.

Reflection/Application:

Bartholomae shifts the paradigm of writing instruction so dramatically that I think most students and teachers would fall off. The assignments he suggests would indeed, I think, develop better writers, but they require an abandonment of most of the conventions that teachers and students have learned to navigate through years and years of work. To assimilate the techniques, and most importantly, the thinking processes would be time-consuming and frustrating for most teachers, and would bewilder most students.  However, I think that through a slow introduction of changed ways of looking at the writing process  - through an initial freedom to find a meaningful starting point in a text, for example (as he does with his Bleak Hill model), students and teachers could develop more innovative ways of approaching their writing. The most significant perspective I got from the reading (and I spent a lot of it very confused) was the need to approach writing as a reader, going back over what I have said again and again to ascertain if it is really what I want to say – reworking it and revising it again and again until it is truly my own discourse. I also found his disintegrative approach to “topics” interesting – negating the thesis approach to papers entirely, and changing the writing process from a persuasive argument to an open-ended conversation.

I can envision modifying some of his approaches to use in a high school classroom – the journal writer turned reader, for example, is a great way to introduce revision and writing perspectives, and the construction of a new, more relevant discourse could be an exciting approach to a difficult text.  Bartholomae conceded that discourses have codes that teachers need to help students discover and apply, that those things do not occur naturally. I would include grammar among these, and weave that into the explorations.

In terms of my own writing, the timing is of this discussion is very interesting. I have a graduate level paper due, which I need to start writing during the break, and I had a conversation with my graduate peers this week in class – with an instructor watching silently – about the techniques and expectations of graduate level writing.  Everyone in the seminar had incredibly helpful advice on how to shift my own discourse from undergrad to graduate level. It was a process of discovery for all of us.