Summary of Inventing the University

This is a summary of Dr. David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University. Throughout this article, David Bartholomae shares his thoughts on how students are expected to know how to write for the university and speak the language and jargon of college professors (Bartholomae). This tends to cause problems because most students have yet to master this. Students are given a variety of topics to write about and a lot of the time they don’t know much about the subject, therefore they have to invent for the university. Bartholomae analyzes three different essays written by basic writers and points out the common mistakes that they make. Bartholomae quotes Linda Flower’s thoughts on student writers and how students should be taught. She states that the difficulty inexperienced writers have is the transition from writer to reader based. Experts are able to put themselves in the readers shoes and picture how they’ll react to the writing. Both Bartholomae and Flower argue that students would be more successful if they were taught to write and revise for the readers. Teachers and students would also benefit if the community’s conventions were clearly written out and taught in the classrooms (Bartholomae). Bartholomae claims that students need more creativity when writing and use he or she’s own commonplace instead of trying to please the university with the academic lingo. Doing so will encourage our student writers to take on authority, draw their own conclusions, define their own commonplace, be creative, and most importantly succeed in their academic writing.