Fulwiler/Audience

“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.” – Homer Simpson

(Thaddeus-  My comment mainly concerns the  analytical/“critical” response-type essays and the ethos we may approach/compromise/ and present in this specific type of assignment; also, I only had in mind literature, and then only prose assignments; the Foucault article from last semester kinda fits here: he wrote that discourse is not equally inclusive in society because of societies’/y’s innate desire to believe its own bullshit. Truth is subjective because of the different experiences of cultures whose history-I can’t remember whether I should capitalize the h-is a discourse. Societies have different perspectives and they want to defend their truths, their discourse, by exclusive knowledge. Maybe the Fish article also fits here, one of the things he mentioned was that seminar classes have their own, artificial, discourse).

So in the classroom, the student, to refer to Fulwiler, writes to a teacher as the main audience. She points out the first biased audience is the teacher, whose reliability and authority we trust. It’s an example of discourse, the political microcosm of the classroom to the rest of the world; this is exactly why Elbow developed free-writing. It seems to me, analysis papers/assignments are the disproportionate majority of a student's academic writing and their ethos shows up less in these instances.