Telling Secrets

Attatched is two of my peers essay and what I would like is if you could help change mine to look like theirs.

The syllabus for this course stated “This course will function as a laboratory, or
research space, aimed at making explicit and thereby enabling you to inspect
and transform your habits as readers and writers. The purpose of “detaching
you” from your familiar ways of reading and writing is to enable you to perform, as a reader, writer and
thinker, in ways you couldn’t have without taking this course. Our focus, then,
will not be on you showing me what you are already able to do but, rather, on
what you can’t yet do, but need to learn in order to become academic readers
and writers. This focus will involve interfering with the kinds of writing and
reading you feel comfortable with. You will be able to say that this is not
like any other English course you have ever taken, because it is designed so as
to help you enter a community of learners and researchers and to contribute to
reshaping it. In short, the course is designed to enable you to create a transferable
practice of literacy: that is, a purposeful mode of reading and writing that
prepares you to enter the varied forms of academic discourse you will encounter
in the course of your education.

Course Project

Your
work in this course will comprise a single essay, upon which you will work
throughout the semester, focused on a single text. The text we will working
with is “Telling Secrets: Student Readers and Disciplinary Authorities” by David
Bartholomae, one of the most important thinkers in the study of composition and
college level student reading and writing. I have chosen this text for us to
work with for a couple of reasons. First, in order to learn how to become an
academic reader and writer, it is necessary to read authentic academic texts,
written in the context of inquiry conducted within a discipline. As a newcomer
to this discipline, you will find it difficult to engage in dialogue with this
text, which means that in doing so you will learn how to learn—that is, to
enter conversations the terms of which you need learn as you participate in
them. Second, I have given you a text that concerns the subject matter of this
course so that in reading it we can develop a vocabulary for naming the
practices you learn in the course—so, for example, when we see Bartholomae
distinguishing between different modes of pedagogy and different ways of
learning, you can use those distinctions to examine your own relation to your reading
and writing.

Rather
than having you write separate papers, I will collect, over the course of the
semester, 3 “installments” of what will eventually become your final paper. I
will comment extensively on these installments but I will not grade them. I do
this, first, because I want to write comments that will get you focused on
revising your work rather than comments focused on justifying a grade and,
second, because I want to be able to grade you solely on what you show you are
able to do at the end of the course. We will speak over the course of the
semester about how you can assess your performance in the class using my
comments and I will tell you if your work constitutes failing work for a given
installment, or if it needs to be edited more effectively so as to be “readable”
in the terms of the course. The Learning Outcomes listed below will be more or
less directly translated into the assignments I give you through the semester.
These outcomes name practices that you can repeat and master so that you can
come out of the class prepared to do academic level reading and writing. In
this way, my comments can draw directly upon the outcomes and inform you where
and how you are meeting them, or what you need to do in order to meet them.”

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