The Goals of Writing in a University

I would in all measures consider myself a writer. To be specific my genre of writing is fiction, however the role of writer changes when I am put in the university setting. Here I have no genre, I am being taught various methods and forms of writing.

From this perspective it seems as if I am garnering multiple skills, but in reality I am given surface level instruction. I am taught enough to get me in the door and even that isn’t fully from my level of skill. The university I go to is highly recognized and the name alone can get you a meeting. Sad, but true. Spellmeyer in Inventing the University student mentions how public schools are seen as the  “inoculation of normative values and behaviors rather than the dispersal of knowledge”(40). Which in part holds some truth, students move on to college with not all the aspects or techniques needed and professors in college do not take the time to elaborate on these methods. So in turn students’ dirty little secret is that they are technically half-baked. I for one had a really good AP English teacher, but I did suffer and still do with misplaced commas and comma splices. Entering college I was red flagged on this, but never actually taught how to better myself.

As aforementioned a writer in university differs from one’s self-acknowledgment as a writer. In the world of academia, writing changes to suit the needs of the teacher and the environment that we are in. Many students write in a way that is needed to pass their classes. To create in the university one must go through an “untiring labor of ascetic self-suppression and refashioning” (Spellmeyer 41). At a university you do not become a university student but a student of the university. And in this formation we are bombarded with specific desires as Teresa Redd in “Tryin to make a dolla outa fifteen cent”: Teaching composition with the Internet at an HBCU points out, technology is overwhelmingly “western, and white-[as seen] from the Standard English grammar” (365). The university student is given one idea and role as right, diminishing any other within in them.

For the university I am but another students paying my dues for an ‘education’ that may or may not get me a job. Graduating with a degree no longer holds power over the workforce. We are in the same boats as others struggling upstream towards a dream of a job.