Bartholomae's possible views on my first essay

When I re-read the essay I wrote last week about my views on creativity, I was reminded of the sample essay about jazz improvisation that Bartholomae used as an example in his essay "Inventing the University." The writing style in both the jazz essay and my essay are very similar in that both essays have the same layout and style of discourse. Both essays also express similar ideas about creativity. There are some key differences between my first essay and the jazz essay. The first is that my story about creativity was quite a bit more detailed than the story about jazz improvisation. The second difference between the two essays is the fact that my essay gives a definition of creativity that seems to apply to everyone, where as the jazz essay's creativity definition is written as a personal opinion. instead of writing, "Creativity to me, means..." I wrote, "Creativity is something that..." and "Doing something creative means ..."

I think that Bartholomae would say that I don't take enough risks in my writing, and that I should have attempted to write in the style of academic discourse, even if that means making more mistakes. I also think that Bartholomae would comment on the fact that I don't have a clear idea of who my audience is because I didn't write to a specific audience. He would be right. I didn't think about the audience when I wrote my essay, other than the fact that i knew my professor would read, and grade, it. This did not affect my writing other than the fact that I payed more attention to grammatical errors and sentence structure. I didn't chance the tone or style of writing to reflect the fact that it was an academic essay as opposed to something that I wrote for a friend or for my own personal reflection. Now I can more clearly see that Bartholomae made an excellent point when he said that we need to be aware of our audience and write to them.

The fact that I wrote a definition of creativity instead of an opinion would be something that Bartholomae might also focus on. WHen I start talking about what creativity is, I stop talking about what happened to me and what I think, and wrote as if I were a very credible source on the definition of creativity. I didn't second guess myself or classify it with saying that it is something that I think ("creativity to me..."), I wrote with authority. Bartholomae talked about writing with authority and about needing to make yourself an expert on the topic you are writing about, even if you don't know very much about it at all, so that your audience will take you seriously and believe what you have to say. If you aren't convinced that what you have to say is true, or that it applies to everyone instead of just yourself, then why should your audience read what you have to say? While I was writing my essay i was trying to understand what creativity was, and I played around with different definitions and concepts that incorporate creativity, however I didn't let my confusion or questions show in my essay. I'm glad that I didn't show my conflicting thoughts, but I think that it might have been interesting and more reveling of myself if I had.

After reading Bartholomae's essay I feel like I understand academic writing a little bit more, however I still have some questions. I still don't feel like I understand the concept of commonplaces. What exactly are they and what sort of role do they play in our writing and the writing of others? How do they impact our reading of essays, and the people who will be reading my own essay? Even though I don't like Bartholomae's tone in this essay, and I think that he was arrogant and stuck-up, I still agree with most of the points he made and can understand his point of view a little more now than I could one week ago.