https://thedeepsleep.wordpress.com/
I like the way that Bartholomae looks at a student writing a college entrance essay and the way that the student conforms to what the audience wants. This is something I believe is overlooked too often in everyday writing. Somewhere in his article he refers to the student as a fellow researcher of writing, which is why I am not sure I support the asking of this “creative” question. The student knows that they are writing to impress college faculty and teachers, so they write for that type of audience. If you have to limit yourself to a specific audience, are you really being as creative as you can possibly be?
He then goes on to say that a writer who can “successfully manipulate an audience are writers who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege.” I agree with first part in that a writer must imagine themselves as the audience, but not with the second claim. Perhaps if you reworded the latter statement to something such as “a position of authority” because you the reader should expect to learn something from the writer. The audience can learn something factual within the text, or they can learn the writing style of the author. He goes on to call this “position of privilege” a position of power, something that I agree with. I am just struggling to see how this position gives on privilege. I agree that it is a position of power because you mare claiming to teach the audience something that they may or may not already know.
For the duration of the article every time he says “privilege” I replaced it with “power” or “authority.” Both work well as substitutes, and I still insist that they work better. But I digress. Bartholomae makes a great point that when the student is writing for the teacher, he [student] is assuming a position of power without necessarily having such a position. Which, in a way, sets the student up for failure since they cannot possibly know exactly what the teacher does and does not know. For if you are going to successfully manipulate an audience, knowing your audience is a necessary step. When a 12th grader is writing for a forty, fifty, perhaps even a sixty year old teacher, the gap between audience and writer is enormous! How can the 12th grader even remotely assume what the audience knows with such a considerable age gap? Food for thought.
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I find Slack interesting in that he brings into the discussion an ethical point of view. Recognizing technological authors as writers is important, not only for the reputation of the writer, but also for the validity of their work. There isn’t much point in accepting someone as a writer only to dismiss their work as irrelevant and unimportant. Their medium might be different, but their message is still important.
Bringing this back to ethics, I think no work is without, for a lack of a better term, sides. Even in narratives the author gives you a choice of sides, and you must pick one. For example, in the Twilight series (I do not like this series for the record) the author creates division in by the formation of two sides: Team Edward and Team Jacob. It just goes to show that even in fictional writing, which people do not often consider to be persuasive, there are elements of rhetoric that force us to take sides.
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I am now going to respond to the questions.
- I have to say that I have had some fun in being called to write in certain discourses. It is nice to every once in a while assume power over your teachers when writing papers, but it comes with a down side. If I pick a subject of which they have great knowledge, well I am more or less screwed. This is the main reason that I love being able to pick my own topics for papers. If I wrote a ten page paper about how the Roman Empire dealt with injustice issues for a Sociology class, I might get a better grade because the teacher is not very knowledgeable about the subject.
- Other than the student & teacher discourse, I find myself in two other discourses. One for social media which includes family and friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. The second discourse is the one I have for my project, me and pretty much anyone who has access to a computer. Since my blog does not pertain to any specific group, I am seemingly required by the laws of writing, I have to write for everybody.
- I am not really joining a discourse community with my project. Since birth I have been part of this world whether I wanted to be or not, simply making my thoughts (or dreams in this case) known to the world via blog does not really make me more of member of this discourse community. It might be easier for someone to interact with me since I have joined the blog community, but I am still a part of the community even without a blog. At least that is what I think. The characteristics of this community are universalism, immediacy (in terms of once I write a blog post it is immediately available for everyone to view and, or comment on), and privacy if I so choose.
4. I think that this project will help me to participate in two other discourse communitites, the blog community and the polyphasic sleep community. By reading the blogs of others and learning certain criteria that blogs are known to have, I will be able to better communicate my point either in my own blog posts, or when commenting on others. This project will also help me in communicating with the polyphasic sleep community. Through my experiences and research, I will be able to use the jargon specific to this discourse community. I might not be an expert by the end, but this project will definetly prepare me for participation in both communities.
