Z.S TIRP 2

Thinking and Writing in Academia

Moving into the world of academia students are bombarded by a new environment. And in this environment how you think and sound differs greatly from what they have grown accustomed to. With this jump in technique students become lost in their writing, trying to portray something that is not them.

            In “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty" by Patricia Bizzell she mentions that outer-directed theorists believe that the students problem is more that “they can’t think or use language in the ways we want them to.” The reason students have a hard time coming up with the ideas for their papers is not because they can’t do it but because they were never taught to do it.

            Thinking of this brings to mind my first English course in college Lit 2020. Our paper was an explication on Bleak House using a symbol to show a certain aspect of Dickens’ writing. The prompt also included symbols we were not allowed to use. I remember sitting at my laptop for hours rewriting my opening paragraph because I had no clue what to write. I had no idea what to write, what I was arguing and where to begin.

            After hours of combing through the book again I finally made a choice to choose my symbol of papers, but now the question was what did they mean. When I did decide what role this symbol of mine played it was time to write. And here another problem arose as David Bartholomae in “Inventing the University” said I had “to learn to speak [academia] language, to speak as [they] do, to try on the peculiar knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of [the academic] community. This is an excerpt of my first paragraph from that paper.

“One of the many aspects Charles Dickens tries to portray throughout the novel Bleak House is the mess Britain has made upon itself with the issue of the Chancery. The law is a great bereavement of Dickens and he uses the symbol of papers throughout the novel to show this to his audience. No matter how much he blames the legal system or the government for the troubles of Britain, he also points a finger at the people of Britain. The use of paper is also seen to show this alternative view of the same idea. Another aspect found in the novel that Dickens uses to express himself is the fog found in London from the factories, which is used to support Dickens idea of the decline of British society.”

Here I have taken on a voice; even then when I was writing the paper I knew I was following a construct I had seen but never learned. Trying in vain to create a paper worthy of a substantial grade.

Many other students take on a voice while writing academic papers too “appropriat[ing] a specialized discourse…as though [they] were a member of the academy…”(Bartholomae). The objective in doing this is to create a well-crafted paper, but for the student it is forced and sometimes too for the teacher.

The method of proposing and idea and writing a thorough analysis of it becomes difficult when you are not taught how to do so. Thinking and writing differ with different assignments and courses. For a student to grasp that and complete a work in a way desirable to a teacher they have to be shown how to do so or in the end they will end up lost in what they are doing and who they are.