Inventing the University

After reading Inventing the University, I found one of Bartholomae's points extremely useful: "When students are writing for a teacher, writing becomes more problematic than it is for the students who are describing baseball to a Martian." I cannot tell you how often, when writing, I would aim solely at writing to meet my instructor's wishes and be done with it. Honestly, it gave me a negative perception of writing papers and made the writing experience a very uncomfortable one. Last semester, one of my professors pointed out how I needed to take command and write as though I were the expert. Bartholomae's advice for students to "assume privilege without having any" effectively reinforces the professor's words to me: be the expert. Make learning a matter of invention and discovery, rather than imitation or parody. From within my major, we frequently must look at a piece of art and describe what we see. I must draw upon the knowledge of the principles and elements in design to stay within the dialogue of the art community and avoid, at all measures, shooting from the hip.