In "Inventing the University," Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5 no. 1, pp. 4-23), David Bartholomae argues that when students enter the university, they are confronted with the demand to create texts that work within the various communities of the academy. One day they have to adopt the stance, the interpretive schemes, and the language of a literary critic, and the next day those of a social historian. They have to learn what (to many) are new ways of making and substantiating claims, and to do so entails negotiating a tension between their "personal" ways of speaking and the conventions of the academic genre. They have to learn, that is, to speak in others' voices.
Bartholomae describes this development in terms of "an enabling fiction": we ask students to write as if they were already privileged insiders. We ask them to take on the role--the voice, the stance--of an expert whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. And it is this fiction that "basic writers" can't maintain. Too quickly they slip into the more immediately available and realizable voice of the teacher giving a lesson or a parent lecturing at the dinner table--into a different kind of authority. They offer advice or homilies or commonplaces rather than conclusions. A writer may shift, for example, from the academic argumentation to a Lesson in Life, having located herself in a context, finally, that she does not "own" and that is not available to her ways of producing text (see Writer A in Molly Voorheis' article). She gets lost in the discourse of her readers.
From this perspective on development, writers are not just preparers of text, but participants in situated language events, and judgments about writing ability focus less on local features of text and more on the quality of interaction between writer and reader via text.
The articles in this first issue of Reflections share an interest in the question of role and authority as freshmen write their way into the university. Molly Voorheis describes the complexity of drawing up a profile of SU's "basic writer," and Faith Plvan presents ways to help inexperienced writers to enter "the fiction," to take on the role and authority of academic discourse. In papers originally written for a class magazine in English 613, Anthony DiRenzo makes a case for the developmental usefulness or perhaps even necessity of role playing and masks in a writing class, and Lucia Perillo questions the actual roles (and stances) we call for students to take on by the assignments we set up.