Week 8: Reading response

     In his article, Bartholomae argues that writing assignment's should instruct the student toward a particular way of viewing writing.  Rather than asking student's to write upon a subject, Bartholomae believes they should write about the process of writing upon a subject.  That is: student's should focus on how a subject is presented, rather than the subject itself.  He proposes that to do this, assignment's should be sequential, and in a sense unsatisfying.  Bartholomae argues that each assignment should disrupt or interfere with the conclusion of the prior assignment, forcing the student to evaluate their own expression on the subject (and thus becoming aware of the process of effectively discoursing upon a subject).  In essence he believes that the instruction of writing is not the teaching of "writing" the subject, but teaching writing as an critical process of expressing one's ideas in a preexisting discourse, full of subjects, ideas, and modes of interpretation.

     I appreciate Bartholomae's wit in describing writing education.  His expression of how one should effectively approach writing instruction provides a helpful heuristic for understanding what the "writing process " really is.  I view writing in the same way: as a process of manipulating the symbolic language of text  for the purpose of successfully articulating an internal idea.  But Bartholomae's article gives me a new resource through which i can interpret the concepts of the writing process and the mental processes inherent within it.  I don't write assignments so there is nothing to change, but his article has given me a series of sound parameters for the construction of future writing assignments, which focus on the successful teaching of the writing process.  I would use his emphasis on interference in my own instruction and assignment creation.  I believe that students suffer when asked to give a concrete opinion on a subject.  It requests the individual to communicate an absolute.  When students write in absolutes they cannot, or will not, critically engage a subject, and will forgo an appreciation for the complex relationship between subjectivity and reality.