Ethan Shapiro

Craig
ENGL 310
23 March 2017
Bartholomae and Genre
Per Bartholomae university students are at a disadvantage when it comes to academic
discourse. They find themselves lost in this world of writing with little direction and a lack of
knowledge. Bartholomae aptly titles his essay Inventing the University as he has come to
understand that these students, while writing in the university world, do not have a solid grasp on
the academic aspects of such. They might be writing in the terms of the topic, but they are
merely acting or putting on a mask.
Genres are introduced to writers to filter and focus their writing in a more understandable
fashion. Wardle says it perfectly by stating, students can be taught ways of writing (genre and
genre knowledge) that they can then transfer to the writing they do in other courses across the
university, (Wardle 765). Wardle is specifically referring to first year composition students
when she makes this remark, and when talking about teaching writing in both Wardle and
Bartholomaes pieces they are solely focusing on university students.
Genre allows students to have a set framework to work in when tackling something new.
Despite possibly never having worked with fantasy, per se, they can draw on key ideas like
magic and other-worldliness to set up their writing. For this to work, a student would need to
know what magic is, what dragons are, what elves are Basically they need to have some
knowledge to work with before they go into the actual subject. If students are taught how to write
in the genre of scientific research responses, then they will be able to emulate this idea in their
science classes.
The issue that arises with trying to teach first year students the ideas of genre is that some
of them might not know the basics of writing before heading into this deeper ocean of practice.
As David Russell put forth, they are trying to teach ball handling skills to students who dont
know how basketball is played in the first place.
Once genre is made a focus of writing you must delve deeper into each individual genre
to work out all their unique aspects. In some ways, this will make the class much more than a
simple first year English class. In my opinion, when involving genres, the class takes it into a
more English focused area which is not necessarily what students in these first-year classes are
looking to do. Being able to write academically is important for almost every position in life and
I think its great to try and expand on that, but a first-year classroom is not the place to do that.
When writing in a genre that students know nothing about they are not able to even
comprehend what they are writing to its full extent. Thus, the student is not able to make the
right sentences to get their ideas across. Bartholomae puts it nicely when he says, The act of
constructing a sentence, then, becomes something like an act of transcription, where the voice on
the tape unexpectedly fades away and becomes inaudible. Students who are not capable of
writing within different genres should not be asked to write in specific terms using language they
dont yet know.