Here’s to the University

When I first started classes at a university I don’t remember changing my writing to fit any specific stereotype or genre I imagined the university to have. I just wrote how I thought I should write and it seemed to work well. Until I took my first theory class. For those students in this class who are not English majors, your theory class is composed of the literary critics. They’re the people that have somehow managed to become famous in the English discipline by inventing strange ways of looking at language. They’re people like Foucault, completely unreadable, but required for the degree. Now some of you might be saying you loved theory, and I did too, but let’s be honest, it’s a bit of shell shock to start reading dense theory when all you’ve been reading before are novels. When I entered that class I became aware of a different kind of academic writing, and this is the writing I equate with the university. At that point I began trying to write like a critic. Of course, I was not any good at it. My attempts were mere appropriations, as Bartholomae would call them. From that point on I have been consciously aware of trying to write like an academic. Whatever that means. As I have entered graduate school that has been even more important as I have become aware of being published and presenting at conferences. These are things that help you get noticed and to do that you must appropriate the language of the university.

But my journey may have been unique. I have watched other students who know they need to write a specific way, but they are not quite sure how to get there. Oftentimes this means that they add a bunch of words trying to make their paper sound important when in reality they just muddle their meaning. I think most students realize they need to write “differently” in order to succeed, but they don’t understand what this difference is, and they have not quite learned how to mimic the language they see in academic essays or other readings. It takes a few papers in order to get the style down and then you switch professors or subjects and you have to start all over again. If only writing weren’t so changeable!

But seriously, is this fair? In order to defend my profession (can I call it that if I’m only a graduate student? It’s kind of a profession) I say yes. If you want to be a doctor you have to learn how to operate. If you want to be a lawyer you have to learn the law. If you want to be a teacher you have to get some kind of certificate that says you’ve taken pedagogy classes. So if you want to graduate from college and be a writer (or even if you just want to graduate) you should have to learn how to write in a university language. In reality it will only improve you as a person and we could all use better writers. Trust me, I edit customer complaints and if I see one more “I did appologize” I might scream. So here’s to the university and their ability to make people mimic a certain style of writing.