Bartholomae starts off with the title “Inventing the University”. If you ask a college student to put it in his/her own words, for example, he/she might say, “Creating the School”. Just like that Bartholomae wants us to create our community by learning and speaking a language. Like the title states Bartholomae’s wants us to invent the university.
Quite often amateur writers have a tough time connecting with the audience. In my opinion, it is possible for many students to struggle with creativity. There are many times when I feel like I should not, cannot put my fullest potential of creativity in my writings. When writing a paper I always feel like it should be formal. However, I came to realization that this is not always the case. The writing style all depends on the audience.
Learning to connect, appeal to the audience is a common struggle. The text “Developing an Idea of the Audience” shows us an example of how to connect with the audience. When texting a friend I would not text formally, such as, “Dear Annie, how are you doing?” instead I would text “Hey girl, what’s up!” Abbreviations are regularly used when texting peers. Depending on the audience the “language” of the writer changes. For instance, “Developing an Idea of the Audience” also gives an example of historians. If a basic writer was writing to a group of historians, he/she would not have a paper full of data, data would not match with the historians “language”; but instead the writer would fill the letter up with records of events. Just like that any writer should look for ways to relate to their audience.
When Bartholomae replies, “writers have to ‘build bridges’ between their point of view and the reader’s”, I believe he is trying to tell writers the importance of the audience. The reason for an audience is to inform them about what you have to say to them. No matter how great your writing is, if you do not unite with your audience and speak a different “language” than the crowd of people you are talking to, and then you are not accomplishing your goal as a writer. That is what Bartholomae means by “sentence-level error”, no matter how good the text is if the audience cannot comprehend it, time is wasted.
I can definitely relate to Bartholomae when he says the writer should speak the language of the community. I agree one hundred percent, because there is no point if the audience cannot relate to what the writer is trying to tell them. The text written by Bartholomae was very informative, and interesting because I could relate to his writing.
Annie Jeong: Writing as a Modern Process 