Academic Discourse

The fact that we should consider when we talk about the academic discourse, and that Bizzell never formulated very well in her two articles, is that language is a social activity that can not be spoken by itself; it can not occur other than through communication between its people; any something new in the society-invention or idea- will find its way through language. As a result, language is a reflection of people’s education, thoughts, emotions and their perspectives of the world. So home discourses that our students bring to college are this language; they are a normal delivery of people’s interactions. Since they are real and spontaneous, they should be respected. Ignoring these discourses is ignoring societies and a span of time that students lived before they come to college.
Bizzell argues that intellectuals and students should not restrict their writing to traditional academic discourse. At the same time, she wrote that she never claimed that every student should have her own home discourse. For me, this is paradoxical because she changed the domain of restriction from traditional academic discourse to hybrid academic discourse for which she set certain traits. So the move is from a set of traits to other ones. What I see as best is that we should encourage our students to use their own discourse; we should also tell them that they do not live in their societies any more; they live in a new community called academe, which has its own way of life. This requires of them to adjust themselves to it (we should make them feel as if they moved to another country, say, China. Do they need to be stripped of their own culture to adjust? The answer is no, of course) They should know that this new community has certain traits which are part of its scientific nature and which they should keep while writing. I totally disagree with Bizzell’s idea that the academic discourse has characteristics that “ are most in accord with the personality traits that they [White male] are already socialized to develop”(56). By this statement she hinted at the idea that the traits of academic discourse was part of all White males’ societies, which means that they, at a historical span of time, spoke in a academic way. I do acknowledge that in the USA this type of discourse was connected with White males not because of special race traits but because of their economical privilege as she put it in an ambiguous way.
The other point on which I disagree with the author is that the text creates us and we do not create the text. My point of view is that neither we nor the text creates each other if the word “text” means the rules and principles of science. The fact is that we and the text are part of a large discourse- the universe which is created by God. To simply put it, this large discourse consists of sub-discourses, each of which consists of elements; we and the text are two of these elements. We are created separately. Our relation is a complementary one. The discourse that includes us can not occur if one of us is not there. Take the scientific discourse as an example. This discourse consists of us, the environment and the principles and rules of science(let’s narrow down this to the Physics discourse) We and physics are created separately. We are here without physics and physics is there without us. As Physicists, we do not create the rules and principles of Physics. We just discover them. We observe their behavior and record it.