Bartholomae: the Academic Argument

I found Emily's presentation of the sides of the Bartholomae/Elbow debate in her side by side chart very enlightening.  It seems sad that two obviously brilliant men should become so locked in their positions that they fail to see how much ground they share.  

I enjoyed much of what Bartholomae's side of the argument had to offer.  I believe that composition courses (especially at the college level) have the primary responsibility of introducing students to the world of academic argument, that they need to teach students to place their work within the academic context already extant, and that the introduction of criticism is important because it is criticism, not literature that provides the basis of what we are asking/teaching students to do as academics.

That said, I think that Elbow's methodology in terms of basic process, the freewrite/edit/freewrite process of developing and finding ideas can be made to work with the production of the high level academic discourse that Bartholomae wants from his students. 

Elbow hits on a very powerful point that I've never encountered from another academic theorist speaking about academic writing when he talks about separating the critical and generative functions, and employing them in recursive cycles to develop the finished product.  While no process works for everyone, Elbow's does work for a heck of a lot of people.  

Rediscovering Elbow's specific version of free writing and encouraging my students to take that freedom in writing some of their papers this year was liberating.  The students looked at me like it was a trick.  "Really?"  "Whatever we want?"  "Grammar doesn't matter?  At all?  No Punctuation?"  I've never emphasized these things in first draft, as I'm sure none of us have.  However, I had, over a long period, failed to emphasize how much they don't matter in the process of generating ideas and in drafting anything but a final copy, and the net effect was to make a large portion of my students think that they mattered all the time.  

In fact, employing Elbow's recursive, creative writing process seems to me so natural that I can't believe I had let it slip out of my own pedagogy.  This more than any other academic approach I've encountered helps teach the process of writing.  

Now then, before I seem to lose myself entirely in Elbow, let me take this back to Bartholomae.  None of these aspects of Elbow's work contradict Bartholomae's academic focus.  One can follow this recursive process in the pursuit of academic, rhetorical prose as well as personal writing.  In fact, by separating the critical and generative faculties during the drafting process as Elbow suggests while maintaining the academic goals and focus that Bartholomae demands I would argue that better papers may be found than would be generated by either gentleman's approach alone.