Problemitizing Audience
...furious about the low grade; he didn’t understand that he had done the assignment wrong. How James had finally interpreted the assignment, he had done it exactly as the teacher had expected him to. Unfortunately for James, his interpretation was wrong. A discourse can obscure the goal a student is trying to obtain. Not being able to understand the contexts a teacher or the material uses makes everything difficult. Rose talks about how Lucia was lost. She couldn’t get the frame of mind to understand her Abnormal Psychology class. Szasz, an author of one of her texts, had “…certain elements of his argument, particular assumptions and allusions, (that) were foreign to her” (Rose 34). Lucia faced a discourse. She hadn’t adapted to the context that was required for the class. There was terminology she hadn’t figured out yet, and it was causing her to struggle. She didn’t understand what was being taught, and that made writing papers impossible. Lucia couldn’t figure out how she was supposed to prove to the teacher she understood the texts when she really didn’t. Even if she had understood the assignment, being in a discourse made it impossible for her to figure out what audience to write to. While students, like Lucia, attempt to seek help of professors to alleviate the misunderstandings of a new discourse, others force their way through the complex nonsense. David Bartholomae wrote about his experiences with students facing discourse in his book “When a Writer Can’t Write”. The chapter titled “Inventing the University” gave insight into one particular individuals’ attempt to prove himself as a decent writer. Bartholomae gave an excerpt from one of the papers the student had written, and commented that “He (the student) moves quickly into a specialized language (his approximation of our jargon)…” (Bartholomae 251). The “approximation of our jargon” that Bartholomae was talking about, is the discourse that the student had to involve himself with in order to sound learned in his paper. This student, like many others, had guessed at what many of the words in the discourse meant, and guessed wrong. He attempted to understand what his teachers were trying to teach him, and found he couldn’t fool himself any better than he could his teachers. After a commendable attempt at understanding the discourse, the student gives up and changes the purpose of his paper. The purpose of his paper is no longer to inform his audience of what he understands of his learnings, but to turn the audience into “…students and he the teacher, giving us a lesson” (Bartholomae 251). The discourse and audience that the student faced proved too much for him to handle. Although he may have had a brilliant idea for a paper, being a writer his “…ideas or his motives must be tailored to the needs and expectations of his audience.” (Bartholomae 243), something he could not do. Often times, if a student understands the discourse of a class and what the assignment is about, they’re confused about their audience. Peter Elbow has written about this problem with audience. His book “Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process” talks about how many students will resort to writing for teachers as their audience when put in this situation, specifically the chapter “Writing for Teachers”. By choosing the teacher as an audience, a student enables themselves to feel protected by criticism. Students will often write their essays in a way that asks the teacher “ … ‘Is this so? Will you buy that?’” (Elbow 275), without directly saying it. Many times the teacher will feel sorry for the student for not writing the paper in the correct context and give them a fair grade for still having the pertinent information included. In his book, Elbow goes on to talk about how there isn’t much creativity in the minds of college students, how “Perhaps there’s not enough pretending in school and college essay writing.” (Elbow 277). Elbow talks about how even if there isn’t a set audience for a student to write to, they should at least make one up and write their essays to that effect. Elbow made a quick summary of another reason for students to do poorly in their writing assignments; “For one thing, it’s hard to put your heart in your work when you never get the excitement and satisfaction of a real performance for a real audience” (Elbow 279). This statement implies that many students won’t perform as well in a written assignment because there’s no incentive for them to do so. Sometimes, getting a good grade just isn’t good enough to visualize an audience to write to. Rose and Bartholomae have similar view points in their discussion of the effects of audience on students. Rose talked about how Lucia couldn’t understand the discourse that she was placed into. Bartholomae talks about how some students placed in the same situation as Lucia will try and guess at the meanings in the discourse. Although they both gave very different examples on their discussion of discourse, they both had the same general thought in their writings: problems with discourse leads to failure. Not being able to understand what to write about was the basis of Elbow’s writings. Compared to this, Rose wrote about his interaction with James in...