Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: "Writing, Reading and Authority"

Chapter 4: A Case Study of John

In this chapter, Susan V. Wall analyzes a case study of a student who took Bartholomae and Petrosky's reading and writing course on adolescent development. Through conversations with the student and excerpts from a few of his essays, Wall demonstrates how Bartholomae and Petrosky's course allows John to develop as a writer while discussing some of the challenges John encountered.

Initial Struggles

• John struggled with finding a balance between formal writing discourse and saying something meaningful.
• In previous English courses, John had not experienced meaningful discourse with his teachers about his writing, sometimes receiving no feedback at all.
• His previous attempts to redefine his personal identity had failed in high school, but this Beginning Reading and Writing course finally provided a support system for his personal growth. 

Classroom Progress

• With the BRW topic of adolescent development, John was asked to define his sense of self using stories and examples from his own adolescence. 
• Wall points out that this redefining of self is necessarily different from his previous attempts because it is through the act of reading and writing
• Writing about his life from a distanced perspective allowed John to begin developing a "literary persona" that enabled him to view his work as a more critically aware writer. 
• John began re-reading his own work as a stepping stone to meaningful revision, developing an increasing ability to identify the thematic purposes and patterns in his own essays. 
• His teachers comments encouraged John to define his terms (his "dialectical terms" that require an opposing term to clarify their meaning).

Not Quite There Yet...

• John was not writing in what others would consider "academic language" by the end of the course. But he was moving towards that through his increasing ability to define terms and revise.
• Wall identifies the important step John takes in revising as a means for understanding.
• The teachers of John's BRW course moved forward an academic reading meant for after the completion of student autobiographies. This may have hindered John's own sense of developing authority as he was asked to replace the terms he had defined in his writing with terms of academic authors (official "authority")
• John's reading problems (his inability to connect fully with texts or return to them for clarification) hindered his writing progress.

Authority After All

• When Wall interviewed John two years later, he had taken another composition course and passed with a B+
• John had finished the journey he began in the BRW course by truly connecting the reading he did with the writing the course required. Integrating reading and writing towards his own interpretation of academia, allowing him to function with authority as a student.