Art of Persuasion

Paper #1 revision

Elbow versus Bartholomae

Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae have both been at the forefront of the way I have been taught to write in English classes all throughout my high school and college experiences. How is a high school student supposed to decide how to write? Personally, I was not ever really taught how to write. I was told how to write. There have always been some sort of conflicting views going on and for the most part it depended entirely on which teacher was doing the teaching; occasionally, however, it seemed that students were being taught contradictory information on how to approach writing. I was tempted to argue that this clash of views has made my writing suffer and that it has done little except confuse me, but as I thought about it I realized just how much the ideas of Elbow and Bartholomae have brought depth to the type of writing I do.

One English teacher in particular was always there to guide me along the path of writing in what was a unique and often very peculiar way. Mr. Ginapp played a large part in my decision to become an English major. The three years of English classes with Mr. Ginapp were the best years of learning I’ve had. While I definitely learned a lot of other important things in high school and an even larger amount in college, Mr. Ginapp’s class taught me more in such a short amount of time and it shaped me into the person I am.

Mr. Ginapp’s classes looked at English through the scope of both Elbow and Bartholomae. On one hand, Mr. Ginapp taught his classes that it was extremely important to be an individual. This was the first thing I thought of when I began to read Bartholomae’s Against the Grain. At the very beginning Bartholomae says that “how [he] writes is against the grain” (Bartholomae, 19). Up until Mr. Ginapp’s classes I had learned that no, it’s not really all right to write against the grain and that it is only acceptable to write in a perfectly structured and ridiculously predictable way. What Mr. Ginapp did differently was allow his students to experiment while still following certain “traditions.” Many times we would be told to (to borrow from Bartholomae) inherit the way in which we wrote. We were encouraged to borrow from authors we liked. At the same time we were instructed to, as is the problem Elbow presents, be a writer as opposed to be an academic.

The problem here is obviously that we were being told to do two completely different things. In my high school sophomore brain I could not reconcile trying to copy and to be unique at the same time. I got a C on my first paper for Mr. Ginapp; when I talked to him after class his reply was that he liked my paper, but it sucked. His instruction to me was much like Elbow’s goal for students- that they be able “to end up saying, ‘I feel like I am a writer: I get a deep satisfaction from discovering meanings by writing- figuring out what I think and feel through putting down word” (Elbow, 72). In other words, what Mr. Ginapp hoped for me was that I would enjoy writing and let the clarity it brought me extend into something my reader would benefit from as much as I did.

I think a lot of people are taught similarly, but in a way that is not so helpful. They are told what to write, how to write, and when to write. The role of the teacher was to grade assignments based on how well a student wrote more or less exactly what they were told to write. In fact it is quite possible that this is the case based on the fact that many of the writers in my freshman level college writing classes seemed to do fairly well. Regardless, the first time I had to write a reader response, it was a completely new experience for me. I’ll be honest; I was shocked that my interpretation was one that was potentially “right” and that it could be different from the interpretations of others and the agreed upon interpretation that was stated in the teacher’s edition of a text book. Up until that point, it had been the teacher’s way or the highway. Another English teacher would literally tell students who didn’t agree with him (what he referred to as “not working to their full potential”) to go play in the street.

The lesson I took from Mr. Ginapp is one that is still valuable to me today. He taught me that it is important for a student to think for him or herself and write from that particular and individual point of view, but that’s it’s also important to have some knowledge of the past and the perspectives of people who have written before. After all, how could we know that we weren’t saying something that had been said thousands of times if we had no knowledge of past writing? In one class in particular, Mr. Ginapp told the students to write each day in a notebook. At the beginning of class we had to hold up our notebook so he could see that we had written something. It was a notebook he would never read, but one we were told to keep simply because it was important to write in a place where he wouldn’t be grading (in other words, a place without a teacher). One way the notebook shaped my voice was that I was allowed to write anything I wanted. This helped me to not only become familiar with writing for myself, but it allowed me to begin to learn the difference between academic writing and other writing. Mr. Ginapp always told his students that their voice was just as important as what they were saying and that it was always important to retain what was unique about our writing styles; at the same time he made it abundantly clear that a good writer follows the rules of the past, breaking them only when the writer actually knows what the rule is.

I don’t really consider myself an academic or a writer necessarily, but I do feel like I am getting there, and that’s important. In the end, I think it takes a certain experience to become a good writer and a competent academic. The only way I have been able work my way into being either is through writing about various subjects and for different reasons all while under the guidance of someone who has done just those things. For Mr. Ginapp, it was important that his students look to the past for inspiration and learn something from people who had written before us, but it was also incredibly important to my endeavor that I try to keep some sense of voice while bringing parts of the past into each thing I write.