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Hi, folks . . . Rob sent this to me yesterday but for some reason it just
arrived in my inbox today . . . he suggested I forward it if I wanted to,
and I want to . . .

Marcy

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 12:26 PM -0400
From: Rob Irish <[log in to unmask]>
To: Marcy Bauman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Authentic writing

Marcy:  One distinction Bakhtin makes -- in "discourse in the novel" is
between the authoritative voice and the internally persuasive one. He
puts it this way (_p.342 in the Dialogic Imagination_):
"Both the authority of discourse and its internal persuasiveness may be
united in a single word -- one that is simultaneously authoritative and
internally persuasive -- despite the profound differences between these
two categories of alien discourse. But such unity is rarely given -- it
happens more frequently that an individual's become, an ideological
process, is characterized by a sharp gap between these two categories:
in one the authoritative word (religious, political, moral, the word of
a father, of adults and of teachers etc.) that does not know internal
persuasiveness, in the other the internally persuasive word that is
denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is
frequently not even acknowledged in society... The struggle and dialogic
interrelationships of these categories of ideological discourse are what
usually determin the history of an individual ideological
consciousness."

Sorry for the long quote, but it's helping me sort this idea related to
my own research.  Bringing this back to our students and the discussion
of various writing,  I think that it is only when the two voices come
together that students can be confident in their success. Paul Prior has
an article  in RTE looking at this for a grad student in sociology.
More generally, students are trying as they write to enter a discourse
world. As they get feedback about their writing, one of the points they
are given is an assessment of how successful they have been at that
step. Typically, the comments they get may cover a myriad of different
writing concerns: expression, focus of ideas, development or support of
argument, validity of argument etc. So, the student is trying to enter
the discourse community (Geertz's "intellectual village").  They are
trying to write their way in.  The prof or TA marking the paper is the
gatekeeper who decides whether to let them into the outskirts of town or
thrust them into the village square (or maybe it's the centre circle of
hell).

Anyway, if we see our students as working dialogically to reconcile
these two voices, then we can respond differently. We can respond not so
much as gatekeepers as perhaps the welcome wagon, or at least the
information centre.

If you think this is worth sharing with others, you can post it. I
wasn't sure if others were interested in pushing this further.

Rob
--
**************************************
Dr. Robert Irish, Director
Language Across the Curriculum
Applied Science and Engineering
University of Toronto SF B670
416.978.6708
http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~writing
*************************************


---------- End Forwarded Message ----------



      =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
                           Marcy Bauman
                         Media Consultant
                       College of Pharmacy
                      University of Michigan
                           734-647-2227
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