Finding a Voice: Reconciling Discourses in Student Work

first-year university students do not always know what they are trying to write. The problem certainly is not confined to each student’s freshman year—sophomores, seniors, professional writers, and academics all face it. But the struggle to reconcile competing and often contradictory ways of thinking, speaking, and writing are made particularly acute for many first-year students because they are asked to adopt new, sometimes discipline-specific language and methods and use them in internally persuasive ways. They are not just supposed to sound like academics—they are supposed to think like them. In his seminal article “Inventing the University,” David Bartholomae describes the problem when he writes that students “will need to learn to crudely mimic the ‘distinctive register’ of academic discourse before they are prepared to actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse” (83). Bartholomae treats this necessity with some ambivalence, but his argument goes to the heart of the debate between writing across the disciplines and writing within them, or what Jonathan Hall describes as “bottom up” and “top down” approaches (17). The debate forces us to ask whether students should begin to mimic discipline-specific ways of writing and thinking in an effort to one day fully embody those methods, or if instead they should appropriate a set of practices universal to good writing, regardless of discipline. The trouble with this dichotomy is that it glosses the ways of thinking, speaking, and writing that students already bring to the first day of a first-year writing seminar. It ignores, also, that even successful academic writers do not occupy a space fully divorced from the non-academic discourses acting on them. Successful writers do not just don a particular discourse like a mask, but instead reconcile that discourse with other shaping influences.