Inventing the University

This is another article which starts out addressing the phenomena of students reaching for overly academic rhetoric in order to sound smarter than they are. It is an idea that continues to surface in the comp theory papers we are studying and what fascinates me is not the phenomena itself, but the belief system from which it seems to have arisen. We talk about writing as an art, but unlike other forms of art, there is very little credence given to raw talent in the field of writing. There are child prodigies who can play Mozart on their recorder based on hearing it, and visual artists who have risen to the top of their field with no formal training whatsoever. But unlike these other "less academic" forms of art, there seems to be no writing prodigies. There seems to be a level, a higher plane in which the walls are decorated with diplomas and other worthless pieces of paper, where these composition theorists exist. They write these articles on composition, addressing only those on their level, yet designed to "fix" the problems of the rest of us down here on earth. They write about students, but with a remarkable distance from the time when they themselves were students, producing "written Anguish" and substituting in five dollar words they found in the thesaurus. to tie in an idea of Shaugnessey's, why work so hard at "correcting the problem," when the source seems to be the academic atmosphere which fosters the desire to sound smarter than you are? Why not work to dissolve some of the stigma around academic writing, making it more accessible and less daunting to all involved. This would, inherently, ease the pressure on students to sound smart, and eliminate the deisre to use words one doesn't know.