In his 1985 Inventing the University, Bartholomae introduces a basic writer as someone who “is not necessarily a writer who makes a lot of [grammatical] mistakes” . . . [or] “sentence level errors” (Bartholomae, Inventing 17). He defines the basic writer as experiencing a kind of disorientation as a result of the unfamiliar academic discourse community in which he finds himself; a community very different from his “native discourse” community (Bartholomae 12). In this context, Bartholomae describes the basic writer as taking on a persona and behaving in a way he believes is expected of him. The basic writer is intelligent enough to seek out the controlling ideas of a particular academic community, to ‘invent’ a university in its image, as a naive means of orienting himself to this new context. A characteristic error, however, of this BW student is that the language he uses in his writing comes from the voices in his head; that is, the voices of his teacher, the voices of his parent, or the voice of some other authoritative figure. The end result is that what ends up on the page is a text that comes through him, “not from him” (Bartholomae 8).