The Use of Ethos to Emphasize the Use of Logos in the Article Inventing the University by David Bartholomae

As a writer, one must consider who they are writing for and what the best way to communicate with that person is. David Bartholomae addresses this issue for the academic discourse in college and universities. He addresses the issue as to why many newer college students struggle with essay at the college level and how to help students improve their writing capabilities In the article, “Inventing the University”, by David Bartholomae uses ethos to help emphasize his use of logos through using other respected experts to help explain his opinions, and through is use of personal experience.

From the very beginning, Bartholomae’s audience reads a quote from Foucault. Foucault is an extremely well—known scholar amongst higher education English professors Instantly Bartholomae is building credibility with his audience by using well»respected experts to show that he as an author also respects.

Foucault’s opinions Bartholomae uses “Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse”.

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This sets up Bartholomae’s introduction by using Foucault‘s ideas to spark thought about what “discourse“ is to higher-level education. He uses Foucault as an introduction to his opinions about discourse, and how “basic writers” struggle with accurately communicating with-in specific discourses. This allow for Bartholomae to then further set up his ideas and opinions on what discourse is and why it is important This helps with Bartholomae’s use of logos because it immediately begins to legitimize him as an author.

His audience respects Foucault, therefore someone who uses him gains respect as well.

The audience sees that Bartholomae understands his audience and can see that he utilize resources that give him as an author credit Bartholomae also gains credibility by not just accepting other scholarly opinions to be true, but by challenging some of those scholarly opinions. He uses Linda Flower, whom is also a well-known English scholar, and respectfully disagrees with her statement on what basic writers struggle with. “Teaching students to revise for the reader, then will better prepare them to write initially with a reader in mindmthe difficulty of this act of imagination, and the burden of such conformity, are so much at the heart of the problem. He then summarizes the rest of Flower‘s opinion and then goes on to explain that her opinion on the matter is the reason why beginning writer struggle to accurately communicate. The ethos is found in this example through his use of using another scholar, but also questioning her opinion.

This shows the audience that he is not only one who considers other peoples thoughts and opinions, but also as an individual can test other’s statements and the issue at hand and create his own theories. Being able to use conflicting opinions in a paper and use it to strengthen a paper, shows that as an author, He knows what he is doing. He also uses other respected sources to help prove his point by bringing in outside sources that he agrees with. Bartholomae uses Pat Bizzell to back up his opinions. He even calls her “one of the most important scholars writing now”. The readers instantly know that Bartholomae respects Bizzell. He uses Bizzell to express to his audience that students cannot communicate to their intended discourse because they as new students do not have the knowledge to speak that specific discourse language.

This is the use of ethos because Bartholomae is again using reliable and respected outside sources to show that he as an author has formulated opinions based off of another’s opinion and that he has thought out is ideas thoroughlyi He then uses gives an example from his experiment and uses Bizzell opinion to further explain why the student struggles with writing the paper. Another way Bartholomae uses ethos to emphasize his tactic of logos is by using his experiment he conducted to help show how he came to his conclusions. From the beginning of the article, the audience knows that an experiment was conducted in order to look at where freshman students writing abilities were at. However, Bartholomae never really gets into the details of his experiment until he knows he has established a lot of credibility with is intended audience. After he has used multiple expert opinions to show that he has done his research and feels as though he can be trusted.

He then begins to delve into the results of his experiment and talks about what some of the patterns were shown throughout the entire process of the experiment “Notice, in this essay, the key gestures, one that happens to appear in all but a few of the essays I read. At this point in the article Bartholomae begins to give common mistakes students made in essays and further explain why it is an issue and how to fix it. He established credibility here too because Bartholomae conducted his own experiment, so the audience trust that what he is saying is true because of his personal first-hand experience with those issue. This is when Bartholomae really begins to get behind his logic of the article, He takes the data he has collected and begins to infer and further explain where basic writers struggle within an essay and why they tend to struggle there.

The ethos comes into play because Bartholomae uses multiple examples and the audience see multiple excerpts from these examples, and he is able to use those excerpt to prove his points. He is also able to prove the reoccurrence of these issue because in his examples these issues show up with in more than one of the examples Bartholomae is able to effectively make his argument through his use of ethos emphasizing his tactic of logos. This overall tactic works because Bartholomae know his audience and understand how their thought process works. He understands that the constant and blatant use of pathos will not read as well with his audience because they are higher education English professors and they have developed he skills to see past the overused tactics many writers use in order to persuade someone’s opinion.