Inventing THE University

Like said, this article was a tough read and sort of lengthy, but with the discussion we had in class on Friday, now I could understand it much better than before. The questions my group tried answering had to do with differentiating the "reader-based" from "writer-based" prose and defining "audience awareness." A reader-based prose is pretty much writing in a way which the reader will be more able to respond or relate, and then the writer-based one is just not writing in that way, writing without keeping in mind who your audience is.
Luckily, that leads right into audience awareness which is self-explanatory~
Knowing your audience is a key thing in successfully getting a point across. Besides, wouldn’t it be a heck of a lot easier if both the reader and writer could be on the same page? Heck yes(; "Writers have to 'build bridges' between their point of view and the reader’s." (4/5) I found that line to be true, and a good way to show that connections need to be made between the two. It’s like in a persuasive/argumentative and any other essay, the writer would use counter-arguments to make their own stronger. Basically, I agree with the importance of knowing your audience and trying to write for the reader to better understand you.

“Inventing the university” sounds an awful lot like something a performance self would do, "He has to invent the university for the occasion -- [...] The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community." (1) The performance type’s goal is to please the reader or grader and do what is needed or expected of them to pass. It involves acting/talking/writing differently in certain cases than others, which is known as “code switching.”

When Bartholomae talked about the use of first/second person in writing, and how it's quite common to do so. When that was brought up, I immediately thought of myself. I tend to write using "you,” “I,” or "we" multiple times in previous essays, but have been told not to. It does make sense that I shouldn’t given that you aren’t exactly addressing the reader and you definitely do not want to sound like you’re commandingdemanding them. One time this classmate who was revising my essay commented, “I think you should replace these with something else… it kind of makes me uncomfortable in a way” on my use of “you.” I took his suggestions because that’s not what I intended to make anyone feel and I didn’t want it to seem like I was talking down to the readers.

From what I remember hearing in our discussion, the rest of the groups talked about: voice or authority using the "Clay Model" and the "White Shoes" papers as examples, what “discourse” and “commonplace” mean, how Bartholomae disagrees with the other authors Linda Flower and John Hayes about the problem belonging solely to the writer or something, and “basic writers.”
Oh boyyyyy, does that mean I must be a ‘basic writer” even though I’m not in a remedial English class? XP